Variable Stiffness News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Smart materials that can actively tune their stiffness are of great interest to many fields, including the construction industry, medical devices, industrial machines, and soft robotics. However, developing a material that can offer a large range of stiffness change and rapid tuning remains a challenge. Herein, a liquid metal variable stiffness material (LMVSM) that can actively and rapidly tune its stiffness by applying an external magnetic field or by changing the temperature is developed. The LMVSM is composed of three layers: a gallium–iron magnetorheological fluid (Ga–Fe MRF) layer fo...

Engine mount is an important subassembly installed between the chassis and the engine. Its importance is mainly reflected by its capability of protecting the car body from the engine-induced vibrations. The current semi-active engine mount works to mitigate the vibration by changing its damping, while the property of variable stiffness can further suppress the vibrations by reducing the vibration transmissibility. Therefore, this paper developed a new magnetorheological engine mount which can change its stiffness to shift the natural frequency of the mounting system away from the excitation fr...

Pinehurst Medical Clinic announced today that it has invested in a new video endoscopy system for advanced gastrointestinal (GI) care. The Olympus EVIS EXERA II

Over the recent few decades, the evolving research-field of legged robotics has seen various mechanical and control-based developments. Inspired by biological species, a significant adaptation in modern mechanical leg designs has been the implementation of adjustable stiffness, shifting from what were previously simple linkages to more-complex variable stiffness actuators. Physiological studies previously demonstrated leg-stiffness modulation was not only a common trait in multiple biological locomotors, but also played a key role in disturbance recovery for humans. Guided by this, recent robo...

Engine mount is an essential component to support the vehicle engine and to determine the vehicle dynamic property in terms of noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH). It works as the important interface between the engine and the chassis to reduce the bad impact of the engine-induced vibrations on the car body. To this end, this paper proposed a new semi-active engine mount capable of variable stiffness as an attempt to further improve the vibration reduction capability of the current semi-active engine mount which is only capable of varying damping. This study completed the characterization te...