The purposes of this study are to develop pumping capability of a covered wire-parallel plate type EHD gas pump and to give the optimum design guideline. In this study, experiments have been conducted to study effects of positive and negative dc applied voltage on time averaged discharge current, gas velocity, volumetric flow rate and efficiency for single stage (single wire) EHD gas pump having different channel widths and the multistage (double wire) EHD gas pump at atmospheric pressure and room temperature, where air was used as the working fluid. Experimental results show that: (1) Depending on channel width, the number of wire electrodes and distance between wire electrodes, a maximum gas velocity, volumetric flow rate and efficiency considerably changed and (2) Stable discharge was observed under only positive applied voltage.
