Additively manufacturable micro-mechanical logic gates

Abstract

Early examples of computers were almost exclusively based on mechanical devices. Although electronic computers became dominant in the past 60 years, recent advancements in three-dimensional micro-additive manufacturing technology provide new fabrication techniques for complex microstructures which have rekindled research interest in mechanical computations. Here we propose a new digital mechanical computation approach based on additively-manufacturable micro-mechanical logic gates. The proposed mechanical logic gates (i.e., NOT, AND, OR, NAND, and NOR gates) utilize multi-stable micro-flexures that buckle to perform Boolean computations based purely on mechanical forces and displacements with no electronic components. A key benefit of the proposed approach is that such systems can be additively fabricated as embedded parts of microarchitected metamaterials that are capable of interacting mechanically with their surrounding environment while processing and storing digital data internally without requiring electric power.

Harnessing energy landscape exploration to control the buckling of cylindrical shells

“…aving shed the perception of being a purely problematic phenomenon 1 , postbuckling responses are rapidly being shown to enable a broad range of emerging technologies [2][3][4][5] . Such applications include soft robotics and actuation 6,7 , mechanical metamaterials 8 including origami-and kirigami-inspired designs 9 , morphable soft electronics 10,11 , logic gates 12 , energy harvesting 13 , damping devices 14 , information storage 15 , and bioinspired design 16 . However, in general the extreme complexity of these responses 17 has largely limited studies to investigate simple structures with very few local postbuckled states [18][19][20][21] .…”

Optical Forces: From Fundamental to Biological Applications

“…This technique also enables the fabrication and actuation of different other microsystems as well as strain energy stored metamaterial lattices. Using similar technique, Song et al assembled micro‐mechanical logic gates, [ 212 ] which can be driven between two stable positions by optical force. This optical force‐based assembly of functional sot‐mater microsystems provides a steerable approach for the fabrication of micro‐mechanisms, soft micro‐robots, and other compliant microarchitectures.…”

Kinetostatic and Dynamic Modeling of Flexure-Based Compliant Mechanisms: A Survey

“…With similar conversion formulas, the kinetostatic and dynamic modeling of all kinds of flexure-hingebased compliant mechanisms were carried out based on the finite element method without dealing with the complicated issue of variable cross section in flexure hinges [91,92]. [2,5,51,52] (Reprinted with permission from Wang and Xu [2]. Copyright 2018 by Elsevier; Reprinted with permission from Qin et al [5].…”

“…Copyright 2014 by IEEE; Reprinted with permission from Teo et al [51]. Copyright 2014 by Springer; Reprinted with permission from Song et al [52] (Open Access)): (a) conceptual comparison between rigid hinges and flexure hinges, (b) conceptual comparison between rigid-body mechanisms and complaint mechanisms, and (c) exemplary engineering applications of complaint mechanisms.…”