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Fabrication and Design of Wood-Based High-Performance Composites
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Lightweight Highly Tunable Jamming-Based Composites.

Yashraj S Narang1,2, Buse Aktaş1, Sarah Ornellas3

  • 1Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Soft Robotics
|April 16, 2020
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

We developed a novel sandwich jamming structure for highly tunable stiffness in engineering systems and soft robots. This lightweight mechanism significantly enhances performance and adaptability, outperforming existing technologies.

Keywords:
compositejammingorthosissandwichtunable stiffness

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Area of Science:

  • Materials Science
  • Robotics
  • Mechanical Engineering

Background:

  • Tunable-impedance mechanisms are crucial for enhancing adaptivity, robustness, and efficiency in engineering systems and soft robots.
  • Existing solutions like laminar jamming structures offer tunable stiffness, while sandwich composites provide high stiffness-to-mass ratios, but neither combines both advantages effectively.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To introduce and characterize a novel tunable-stiffness mechanism, the "sandwich jamming structure."
  • To demonstrate the superior performance-to-mass ratio and tunable capabilities of sandwich jamming structures compared to existing technologies.
  • To explore the potential applications of sandwich jamming structures in soft robotics and wearable devices.

Main Methods:

  • Experimental fabrication and testing of sandwich jamming structures.
  • Development of theoretical and computational models to predict and optimize performance.
  • Integration of the sandwich jamming structure into a tunable-stiffness wrist orthosis for functional demonstration.

Main Results:

  • Sandwich jamming structures achieved significantly higher stiffness-to-mass ratios (e.g., 550-fold increase) compared to laminar jamming structures.
  • Demonstrated rapid and reversible stiffness increases (e.g., 1800-fold) unattainable by standard sandwich composites.
  • Theoretical models predicted further orders of magnitude improvement, supported by an optimization routine for design.
  • Integration into a wrist orthosis reduced muscle activation by an average of 41%.

Conclusions:

  • Sandwich jamming structures represent a lightweight, highly tunable mechanism with substantial performance advantages.
  • This technology has the potential to significantly extend the performance limits of existing structures and devices, particularly in soft robotics and assistive technologies.