At the University of Louisville J. B. Speed School of Engineering
Here is a 3D printable inflatable actuator dipped in silicone to make it airtight. This could be an alternative to casting for making soft actuators. There are some annoying things about designing sensors and actuators, and sharing those designs. One big problem is getting everyone on a project set up with the right software to …
Continue reading “Design it online without installing anything”
We had a physics student from Berea College, Fidel Tewolde, in our lab during summer 2013. His project was to create inflatable silicone actuators to drive our bistable beams from one state to another. With a bistable skeleton, you might be able to save a considerable amount of power by shutting off the air pressure …
Continue reading “Summer Student Project: Inflatable Actuators”
Origami is showing up big time in deployable structures, as well as at the microscale. This symposium within the 2013 ASME conference in Portland was unusual both for the attendees’ various backgrounds, from math to aerospace to micro/nano engineering AND the amazing folded paper demos people brought along. “Flat folding” gets into some deep mathematics, …
Continue reading “Symposium on Origami-Based Engineering Design, Portland OR Aug 4-7”
This video shows how two curved beams can interact to produce bistability. The green and blue beams are constrained so that their tips stay a fixed distance apart, shown by the red dotted lines. (In practice, the red line would be another beam made out of the same material.) The green and blue beams also …
Continue reading “Animation of a microdevice with two stable configurations”