Research on Characteristics of Mercury Droplet Flow in Micro Acceleration Switch

Unlike the solid-solid contact of traditional micro acceleration switch, liquid metal can be utilized to solve the disadvantage of solid-solid contact, such as contact wear and signal bounce. Liquid-metal micro switches have demonstrated no contact bounce, low switch-on time, low contact resistance, long life, and the capability to handle large currents. So the liquid-metal micro acceleration switches have attracted researcher’s attentions increasingly. To investigate the flow characteristics of mercury droplet in micro acceleration switch, this paper establishes numerical models of micro acceleration switch by using FLUENT. The effect of contact angle, droplet volume and temperature are discussed in this paper. Based on the VOF-CSF model of FLUENT, a serial of simulations were performed. The simulation results show that the influence of contact angle and droplet volume on flow characteristics is serious, and the influence of temperature is small. As compared with theoretical analysis, simulations are in good agreement with theoretical analysis.