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American Institute of Physics, Applied Physics Letters, 14(105), p. 141903, 2014

DOI: 10.1063/1.4898142

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Active-elastic bistable minimum energy structures

Journal article published in 2014 by Maurizio Follador, Andrew T. Conn, Barbara Mazzolai ORCID, Jonathan Rossiter
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

The design of structures that combine the principles of minimum energy and bistable mechanisms is presented. A minimum energy configuration is achieved by the interaction of one or more elastic elements and two strips of stretched elastomer, which also operate as dielectric actuators. The system has two equilibrium states, and the actuators are used to trigger the switch from one state to the other. An analytical model, based on the approach of energy minimization, was implemented to assist the design of the geometrical parameters. A prototype shows bistability and is able to switch equilibrium state varying its bending angle from −40° to 40°.