Title of Document: ANALYTICAL MODELING AND EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF A PASSIVELY MORPHING ORNITHOPTER WING Aimy Wissa, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Langley Distinguished Professor, James E. Hubbard, Jr., Department of Aerospace Engineering Ornithopters or flapping wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have potential applications in both civil and military sectors. Amongst all categor...

This paper presents a framework for the design of a compliant system; that is, the concurrent design of a compliant mechanism with embedded actuators and embedded sensors. We focus on methods that simultaneously synthesize optimal structural topology and placement of actuators and sensors for maximum energy efficiency and adaptive performance, while satisfying various weight and performance con...

This paper presents the dynamic modeling and design of micro motion compliant parallel mechanism with flexible intermediate links and rigid moving platform. Modeling of mechanism is described with closed kinematic loops and the dynamic equations are derived using Lagrange multipliers and Kane’s methods. Euler-Bernoulli beam theory is considered for modeling the intermediate flexible link. Based...

This paper proposes a novel analytical model for flexure-based proportion compliant mechanisms. The displacement and stiffness calculations of such flexure-based compliant mechanisms are formulated based on the principle of virtual work and pseudo rigid body model(PRBM). According to the theory and method, a set of closed-form equations are deduced in this paper, which incorporate the stiffness...