Effect and Evaluation of an Ultrasonic Atomizer With Large Vibration Amplitude

An ultrasonic atomizer can produce large vibration amplitude is designed. Different from the structure of the usually seen ultrasonic spray nozzle, the atomizer is fundamentally constructed with a hollow tube encircled with several pieces of sectional type piezoelectric actuators, which can radially oscillate the tube to generate desired vibration profile. Atomization is formed on the surface around the liquid outlet of the tube where maximum vibration amplitude occurs. In search of resonance frequency and vibration amplitude, modal and harmonic analyses of the ultrasonic atomizer are carried out by ANSYS. In comparison the simulated results with the experimental results, both are in good agreement. A measurement system is set up for detecting the atomization droplets and calculating the droplet size and distribution. An attempt is to design an ultrasonic atomizer can produce high distribution and small diameter droplets for some application-level requirements, droplet diameter around 20–60 μm is assumed to be the specification for performance verification of the proposed atomizer. In experiment, it is found nearly 90% of atomized droplets fit for the requirement. Besides the most important factor of operating frequency, a relation of amplitude is found to include in the well-known Lang and Rayleigh’s equation.