SUMMARY

Motivated by the interests to understand bio-system dynamics and exploit their potential advantages to create bio-inspired systems for engineering applications, this research seeks to develop a modeling method for designing multi-body compliant mechanisms. This method based on Lagrangian formulation, which relaxes several commonly made assumptions (such as small deformation and fixed rotation center), offers a means to more realistically predict the coupling effects due to compliant bending, twisting and contact with joint clearance on the multibody dynamics in three dimensional space. An improved algorithm (referred to here as dynamic shooting method) will be developed to solve the nonlinear boundary-value problems in both time and spatial domains for the deformed shape of a compliant mechanism, which will be verified by comparing simulated results against published data. The analytical models will be employed (with experimental validation) to investigate the effects of different joint constraints on the dynamic responses of two practical applications. The first analyzes deformable bio-structures for automated poultry meat processing while the second designs a compliant mechanism to serve as a mobile sensor node for health monitoring of ferromagnetic structures. It is expected that the proposed method will find a broad range of applications involving compliant mechanisms.