An IR Methodology to Assess the Behavior of Ferrofluidic Transducers—Case of Study: A Contactless Driven Pump

A single drop of ferrofluid can be used as active mass in an innovative pump scheme. The absence of mechanical moving parts and solid-inertial masses provides high reliability and the possibility to implement the pumping mechanism on preexisting channels. The main focus of this paper is to describe the IR-based technique adopted to "observe" the cap movement inside the channel of the developed pump, thus validating the supposed pumping mechanism. Moreover, experiments have been performed on the pump prototype in order to estimate the average amount of pumped liquid, the drop pressure, and the flow rate as functions of frequency and amplitude of the driving signals.