Compliant mechanisms /
The motivation for this work has been a variety of motions like navigation of pipelines, insertion operations in assembly, and gripping actions, which require the adaptation of the mechanism to the external constraints, rather than avoid them. To this effect, efforts have been made in building mecha...
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| Format: | Thesis eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
[Place of publication not identified] :
[publisher not identified] ;
2001.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Link to OAKTrust copy |
| Summary: | The motivation for this work has been a variety of motions like navigation of pipelines, insertion operations in assembly, and gripping actions, which require the adaptation of the mechanism to the external constraints, rather than avoid them. To this effect, efforts have been made in building mechanisms that obtain the required degrees of freedom through deformations rather than explicit joints in them. Although the use of many joints provides the required number of degrees of freedom, it does so at the cost of making the system very bulky and complex. With the advent of new polymers, the possibility of building joint-free mechanisms that fulfil the requirements of adaptation has increased. Based on this approach, a Magneto Active Polymer (MAP) material has been developed here at the Texas A &M University, in which the actuation is performed by the conversion of electromagnetic energy into mechanical energy. The initial experimentation has proved the vast potential of the use of such a material and a few mechanisms like a magneto active peristaltic pump, have been designed and tested for the first time using this material. In this mechanism, the pumping action is obtained when a moving magnetic field produces peristaltic waves in the magneto active material shaped as a tube. Also for the first time, experiments have been conducted to analyze the response of the MAP material to a pulsating magnetic field with the intent of using the experimental results to develop a model of the MAP. In developing the design for the peristaltic pump and other conceptual models described in this thesis, ideas have been drawn from the different modes of locomotion and actuators present in lower organisms. These have been good sources of inspiration for the work done in this thesis and they have been documented in detail. |
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| Item Description: | "Major subject: Mechanical Engineering". Vita. |
| Physical Description: | xii, 67 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm. Also available online. Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-66). |