Curve Decomposition for Large Deflection Analysis of Fixed-Guided Beams With Application to Statically Balanced Compliant Mechanisms

Statically balanced compliant mechanisms require no holding force throughout their range of motion while maintaining the advantages of compliant mechanisms. In this paper, a postbuckled fixed-guided beam is proposed to provide the negative stiffness to balance the positive stiffness of a compliant mechanism. To that end, a curve decomposition modeling method is presented to simplify the large deflection analysis. The modeling method facilitates parametric design insight and elucidates key points on the force-deflection curve. Experimental results validate the analysis. Furthermore, static balancing with fixed-guided beams is demonstrated for a rectilinear proof-of-concept prototype.

Backward Extensions of Recursively Generated Weighted Shifts and Quadratic Hyponormality

Given the weight sequence for a subnormal recursively generated weighted shift on Hilbert space, one approach to the study of classes of operators weaker than subnormal has been to form a backward extension of the shift by prefixing weights to the sequence. We characterize positive quadratic hyponormality and revisit quadratic hyponormality of certain such backward extensions of arbitrary length, generalizing earlier results, and also show that a function apparently introduced as a matter of convenience for quadratic hyponormality actually captures considerable information about positive quadratic hyponormality.