DESIGN OF TRAVELING-WAVE FIELD PANEL FOR PHARMACEUTICAL POWDERS BASEDON COMPUTER-SIMULATION OF PARTICLE TRAJECTORIES

A fundamental study of charged particle levitation and transport in a traveling-wave field was carried out with a view to design and manufac ture a series of flatbed panels with embedded electrode arrangement, F ourier transformation technique has been used to provide boundary cond itions for the numerical calculations of particle trajectories, From t he analysis, a potential function can be extracted which gives a bette r approximation compared to the one given by Masuda's early work, The numerical method using finite element and finite difference technique to solve field and trajectories, respectively, has been employed with a well-designed user interface. The user interface for integrating bot h methods is of universal value on its own, Based on this study, a com puter program is under development with three levels of accuracy. The first level with consideration of the first spatial harmonic is presen ted in this paper, which is sufficient for designing panel electrode a rrangements for the confinement and transport of dry powders, For the advanced study of particle trajectories under higher harmonic vectors, levels 2 and 3 (currently under development) may be utilized to serve different user requirement of accuracy, A series of panel electrodes have been designed and manufactured based on the analyses presented in this paper. Using these panels, lactose powder samples were successfu lly levitated and transported in the desired direction, Experimental o bservation is in good agreement with the numerical results.