Compliant joints utilizing the principle of closed form pressure balancing

Compliant joints have significant advantages compared to rigid-body hinges due to a monolithic design and the absence of friction, which prevents effects like wear, backlash, and stick-slip behavior. However, the loading capability is often limited and the support stiffness generally decreases during rotation. A new design principle called...

Compliant Full Film Lubricated Bearings: Concept Design & Development

Full film lubricated bearings are machine components that excel in their ability to carry high loads with very little friction. Their main archetypes, passive hydrodynamic and active hydrostatic bearings, are used in a wide variety of applications, ranging from hydraulic pumps to high precision machine benches. They are most commonly lubricated...

Whiffletree based supports for self-adjustable hydrostatic bearings

Hydrostatic bearings are superior in terms of their friction and load carrying characteristics when compared to contact based bearings, but non-usable in applications with non-constant curvature counter surfaces. A possible solution to this limitation is the introduction of deformable hydrostatic bearings components that cope with these...

An eco-impact design metric for water lubricated bearings based on anticipatory Life Cycle Assessment

Water lubricated bearings have been named in literature as a sustainable alternative to their oil-based counterparts. In order to clarify when water lubricated bearings are or are not a sustainable alternative, and inform design decisions, an analytical design tool is introduced based on anticipatory Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This model is...

Efficacy assessment of newly-designed filtering facemasks during the sars-cov-2 pandemic

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic resulted in shortages of production and test capacity of FFP2-respirators. Such facemasks are required to be worn by healthcare professionals when performing aerosol-generating procedures on COVID-19 patients. In response to the high demand and short supply, we designed three models of facemasks that are suitable for...

A Rapidly Deployable Test Suite for Respiratory Protective Devices in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction: The current COVID-19 pandemic has caused large shortages in personal protective equipment, leading to hospitals buying their supplies from alternative suppliers or even reusing single-use items. Equipment from these alternative sources first needs to be tested to ensure that they properly protect the clinicians that depend on...

Development of an interface between a plunger and an eccentric running track for a low-speed seawater pump

The DOT concept for offshore wind energy is a seawater hydraulic network where turbines are directly coupled to a centralized hydro-power platform. The essential missing component is a low-speed hydraulic pump that uses seawater as its hydraulic medium. This low speed hydraulic pump is currently being designed and tested by DOT, where novel...

A Type Synthesis Approach to Compliant Shell Mechanisms