Compliant Mechanisms

This book provides readers with a thorough overview of all aspects of compliant mechanisms, from fundamentals to methods for analysis and design to state-of-the-art applications. The First Edition was a groundbreaking text that helped establish the field when it was published over twenty years’ ago. The new Second Edition is now fully updated to address the growth in the field, including new modeling techniques, expanded applications, and new manufacturing methods, such as additive manufacturing, that have made the creation of compliant mechanisms more accessible. Ideal for students as well as engineering professionals and researchers, Compliant Mechanisms, Second Edition provides a basic refresher on essential topics like strength of materials, machine design, and kinematics before graduating on to more challenging and complex topics. Readers will learn about ways to model compliant mechanisms through new pseudo rigid body models, synthesis techniques, and optimization approaches. Coverage of new types of applications will include metamaterials, lattice structures, MEMs, space-based systems, origami-based engineering, and applications for medical devices. Readers will also find new content on surrogate joints, a computer-aided design approach for making mechanism synthesis more user-friendly, and numerous new and expanded examples and updated problems are included throughout the book.