Investigation of a novel circular arc claw rotor profile for claw vacuum pumps and its performance analysis

• A novel circular arc claw rotor profile for claw vacuum pumps is proposed.
• The disadvantage resulting from the cusp of the reference claw rotor profile is solved.
• The generation method the novel circular arc claw rotor profile is obtained.
• Comparisons of performances between the proposed profile and the reference profile are made.

Claw rotor profiles greatly influence the performances and applications of claw vacuum pumps. This paper proposes a novel circular arc claw rotor profile, in which circular arcs are employed instead of cusps; and obtains the changing rules of claw rotor profiles varied with the value of circular arc radius. Numerical simulation of gas flow in the working process of claw vacuum pumps is carried out, and the stress distributions caused by gas pressure of claw rotors are calculated. The comparisons of pressure, temperature and stress distributions between the proposed profile and the reference profile are made. The results show that the proposed profile has better performances, such as small recess volume, big compression ratio and low stress. The proposed profile is therefore more suitable for high load operation conditions, and has a broad application prospect.