Deflection (engineering)

About: Deflection (engineering) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 30862 publications have been published within this topic receiving 298849 citations.

Design of large deflection electrostatic actuators

Abstract: Electrostatic, comb-drive actuators have been designed for applications requiring displacements of up to 150 /spl mu/m in less than 1 ms. A nonlinear model of the actuator relates the resonant frequency and the maximum stable deflection to the actuator dimensions. A suite of experiments that were carried out on deep reactive ion etched (DRIE), single-crystal silicon, comb-drive actuators confirm the validity of the model. Four actuator design improvements were implemented. First, a folded-flexure suspension consisting of two folded beams rather than four and a U-shaped shuttle allowed the actuator area to be cut in half without degrading its performance. Second, the comb teeth were designed with linearly increasing lengths to reduce side instability by a factor of two. Third, the folded-flexure suspensions were fabricated in an initially bent configuration, improving the suspension stiffness ratio and reducing side instability by an additional factor of 30. Finally, additional actuation range was achieved using a launch and capture actuation scheme in which the actuator was allowed to swing backward after full forward deflection; the shuttle was captured and held using the backs of the comb banks as high-force, parallel-plate actuators.

Random Excitation of a System With Bilinear Hysteresis

Abstract: An analysis is made of the response of a system with bilinear hysteresis to random excitation. It is shown that for moderately large inputs, the additional damping created by the bilinear hysteresis decreases the mean squared deflection compared with that for a linear system with the same viscous damping. However, for large inputs, the decrease in the stiffness of the system due to the bilinear hysteresis causes the mean squared deflection to increase over that for the equivalent linear system.

Bridge deflection measurement using digital image correlation

Abstract: Digital image correlation technique is used for measuring vertical deflections of bridge girders during a bridge load testing. A bridge is loaded by a heavy cargo truck on the bridge road. Then, the deflection distribution is measured by digital image correlation. The applicability of digital image correlation to bridge deflection measurement is investigated by comparing the results obtained by digital image correlation with those obtained by displacement transducers. The effect of random pattern on an object surface is also investigated by measuring with and without random pattern. The results show that the deflection distributions of the bridge obtained by digital image correlation agree well with those obtained by the displacement transducers when the random pattern is attached on the bridge surface. In addition, it is found that the deflections can be measured even if the artificial random pattern is not applied to the surface of the bridge girder. It is emphasized that noncontact displacement measurement is possible by simple and easy procedure with digital image correlation for the structural evaluation of infrastructures.