This paper investigates the deployment of stacks of three legged single degree of freedom paralle... more This paper investigates the deployment of stacks of three legged single degree of freedom parallel deployable mechanisms. All the revolute joints in the stacks are replaced with single axis exural hinges. This minimizes the number of components and eliminates friction and backlash in the joints. Constant stiffness springs are used to model the compliant hinges. The novelty of this work is that it brings out a methodology for determining the stiffness of the exures in each stack such that as they deploy, the individual stacks latch and rigidise progressively from the basal end which is crucial for structural stability of the deploying system. This paper also discusses the deployment controlled by a tether (string) attached at the center of the topmost stack to regulate its motion.
Selection from among competing alternatives is pursued in this work for a rapidly growing class o... more Selection from among competing alternatives is pursued in this work for a rapidly growing class of compliant mechanisms. By using the framework of storage and retrieval of a database, we present a method to select a displacement-amplifying compliant mechanism (DaCM) for a given application. The motivation for this work is to catalogue known compliant mechanisms and thereby select the most suitable mechanism for given quantitative speci cations of the user. The quantitative data for a DaCM includes force, displacement, and stiffness speci cations at the input and the output. The DaCMs in our catalogue consist of slender beams con- gured in particular topologies. These are analyzed using nite element analysis (FEA) and the mechanism's springs-mass lever model (SML) parameters are extracted and stored parametrically as functions of the size of the device. Thus, by using the speci cations of the user, pre-computed parametric SML model parameters are utilized to select the most suita...
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Papers by Neeraj Jhawar