Control System Development and Experimental Study on Ultrasonic Vibration Feeding

Ultrasonic vibration feeding（UVF） method which can quantitatively feed and precisely deposit fine powder is a potential technique for micro feeding.The excitation sources transmit vibration to capillary though the third medium for most UVF devices.The vibrator is directly touched with the capillary can transmit mechanical energy on the capillary as much as possible,and the powder feeding can be controlled more precise.However,there are few reports about it.A direct UVF system which integrates the function of micro feeding,process observing,and powder forming was developed in this work.In order to analyze the effect of the system factors on feeding,a group of L9（3^3） orthogonal experiments are selected to confirm the effect of level change of factors.The three factors are capillary nozzle diameter,amplitude and signal.The flow rate was stable for each combined factors,and the optimum combination for the minimum flow rate are choosing small capillary,small amplitude,and triangular wave orderly.The whole process of feeding includes start point,middle stage and stop stage.Starting of feeding was synchronized to vibration when the amplitude of capillary nozzle is larger than critical amplitude.Then,the feeding process enters the middle stage,the feeding state is observed by the CCD,and it is very stable in the middle stage.Overflow of feeding can＇t be eliminated during the stop stage.The features of the deposited powder lines are analyzed; the overflow can be diminished by choosing small capillary and appropriate ratio of the capillary nozzle diameter to the particle size.Chinese characters lattices were deposited to validate the ability of quantitatively feeding and fixed feeding of UVF.Diameters of all powder dots show normal distribution,and more than 60% dots are concentrated from 550 μm to 650 μm,and the average diameter for all the dots is 597 μm.Most dots positions are well approached to their scheduled positions,and the maximum deviation is 0.27 mm.The new direct UVF system is used to implement experiments,which confirms the precise controllable of feeding.According improve the feeding technique,it suits well for rapid prototyping,chemistry,pharmaceutics and many other fields,which require precise measurement and feed minim powder.