compliant mechanisms howell pdf download

Approaches for solving this problem often require significant software development or cannot address problems in three dimensions. The relaxed state is determined by the desired, deployed state and the stressed geometry is determined by the storage space. One reason for this is that the relaxed and stressed states of the mechanism are known and the loads producing the transition are unknown. While compact folding is desirable for applications such as deployable mechanisms, achieving this with compliant mechanisms can be challenging. This paper proposes the merger of the fields of compliant mechanisms and space mechanisms as a future direction of research in compliant mechanisms, discusses in detail the motivation to do so, and addresses the key factors of applying compliant mechanism technology to space mechanisms.

Compliant space mechanisms offer a promising opportunity to change the fundamental approach to achieving controlled motion in space systems and have potential for dramatic increases in mechanism performance given the constraints of the space environment. Many current space mechanisms are already highly optimized, yet they still experience inherent challenges, and it is unclear if significant improvements in performance can be made by continuing to refine current designs. Compliant space mechanisms are defined as moveable mechanical assemblies that achieve their desired motion, force, or displacement by means of the deflection of flexible members and can perform a necessary function in the environments of launch and space. The results show that the novel bistable designs are much stiffer along the out-of-plane rotation thus are more robust against off-axis or eccentric loading condition, especially when the shuttle is displaced to a position around the second equilibrium stable position (where the flexible beams are in the post-buckling states).Compliant mechanisms offer distinct advantages for use in space that can address many of the issues encountered with current rigid-link space mechanisms. Five bistable examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed bistable mechanism in suppressing unwanted motions and the correctness of the proposed kinetostatic model. An analytical kinetostatic model is developed for the proposed bistable mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel bistable mechanism utilizing torsion-stiffness enhanced flexible beams to restrain the shuttle from out-of-plane rotation. For compliant bistable mechanisms with planar configurations and exhibiting two in-plane stable states, their flexible beams are supposed to undergo in-plane bending deflections, but the out-of-plane deflections can significantly influence the kinetostatics of the mechanism, resulting in inconsistent bistable behaviors when off-axis or eccentric loads present.

Compliant mechanisms howell pdf download