Design of Post-Curing Inflator Using Bistable Locking Mechanism

Abstract

Bistable systems have two distinct stable states, where the system stays without any application of external power. In this paper, stable states of the buckled beam are used along with a four-bar mechanism to design a locking for the postcuring inflator. Post-curing of tires is necessary to avoid deformation in nylon fabric during cooling. Current setups, available in the market, use external force loop for the application of pressure during the process causing significant bending stresses in the frame, hence making the design bulky. Further, such conventional setup limits the number of simultaneous operations on a shop floor. In this paper, we propose a bistable structure-based locking mechanism, where, loading elements are in tension instead of bending, which makes the whole setup compact. We also discussed the scope of pseudo-bistability for design consideration.