Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday November 23 2016, @09:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the Cogswell's-Cosmic-Cogs-vs-Spacely's-Space-Sprockets? dept.

A specifically designed collection of gears is soft on one end and rigid on the other. These robust properties hold even in the event of manufacturing imperfections. This emerging research may lead to new ways of designing geared devices like satellite trackers or watches, and the study has been reported in Physical Review X.

Imagine two connected gear wheels. Turning one clockwise causes the other to turn counterclockwise. Connecting a third gear to both causes the system to get stuck. Leiden physicists Anne Meeussen and Jayson Paulose now have developed a complex assembly of gears that sticks in one place, but which operates in another. Considered as a new metamaterial, it is rigid on one end and soft on the other.

In the video below, this remarkable mechanism seems like magic, but the researchers mathematically devised it. 'The beauty of this principle is that it's a robust system,' says group leader Prof. Vincenzo Vitelli. 'We can decide which parts are soft or rigid, and the mechanism keeps working even if the gears are imperfect. This property is often called topological robustness.'

The video referenced in the story is available on YouTube.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @02:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @02:09AM (#432229)

    > cost-competitive with garbage pails full of sand.

    The Fitch barriers are more sophisticated than you might think. For example, the sand (or water in some cases) is held up in the air so that the center of gravity is about the same as the CG height of a car. This means that when hit by a car it doesn't tend to toss the car up in the air, but instead stops it with minimal pitching or tendency to ride over the barrier.

    John Fitch was a WWII fighter pilot and later a top class racing driver. He devoted much of the later part of his career to auto and racing safety. Here's a page on his barrier design, now widely copied, http://www.racesafety.com/fitchbarr.html [racesafety.com]

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1