Control of Flow Limitation in Flexible Tubes

This paper proposes a new Starling resistor architecture to control flow limitation in flexible tubes by introducing a needle valve to restrict inlet flow. The new architecture is able to separately control the activation pressure and the flow rate: The tube geometry determines the activation pressu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Ruoqian, Lin, Teresa Y., Shamshery, Pulkit, Winter, Amos G.
Other Authors: MIT-SUTD Collaboration Office
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: ASME International 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/109244
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9150-6151
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1944-5977
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4151-0889
Description
Summary:This paper proposes a new Starling resistor architecture to control flow limitation in flexible tubes by introducing a needle valve to restrict inlet flow. The new architecture is able to separately control the activation pressure and the flow rate: The tube geometry determines the activation pressure and the needle valve determines the flow rate. A series of experiments were performed to quantify the needle valve and the tube geometry's effect on flow limitation. The examined factors include the inner diameter, the length, and the wall thickness. A lumped-parameter model was developed to capture the magnitude and trend of the flow limitation, which was able to satisfactorily predict Starling resistor behavior observed in our experiments.