DESIGN OF A NOVEL HAND-HELD PNEUMATIC VACUUM PAD USING CFD

In this paper, a novel hand-held pneumatic vacuum pad is developed using CFD-simulation. CFD is the abbreviation of Computational Fluid Dynamics, which is a powerful and reliable tool to provide an effective insight into the flow field numerically. Nowadays, application of pneumatic vacuum pads may be found in many different real industries, especially in the field of automatic conveyer system, automatic or manual assembly line, semiconductor industry as well as wafer factory, etc. Traditional vacuum pads are generally mounted on robots or other machines to form automated manufacturing systems. In this paper, however, a novel cylindrical vacuum pad specially designed for the easy grasp by the operator’s hand is proposed. To achieve two preset requirements, that is, large lifting-force output and small dimension, the commercial CFDRC software is utilized as a tool to simulate the airflow field and obtain the most suitable geometry for the vacuum pad. Finally, experimental results further prove that the new vacuum pad with two aforementioned features is successfully developed and realized.