Capability of Designing a Novel Fluid Damper Using a McKibben Actuator

Abstract

Flow fluid between moving parts is providing the damping force. Such characteristic can be utilized to build fluid dampers for a wide variety of vibration control systems. Most previous works have studied the application of fluids damper in pistons/cylinders actuator, where the kinetic energy of a vibrating structure can be dissipated in a controllable fashion. The reduction of the friction can cause a sudden jump in the velocity of the movement. Stick-slip friction is present to some degree in almost all actuators and mechanisms and is often responsible for performance limitations. To overcome this problem, this report investigates the capability of designing a fluid damper that seeks to reduce the friction in the device by integrating it with a McKibben actuator. It is also reduced the total weight of such damper. In this paper, the concept of McKibben actuator has been reviewed, the modelling of device made is also presented. Also, the model has been validated experimentally. It is founded that the model predicts the behavior of the test rig with accuracy 85%. Also, the total weight could be reduced to 50% from the original weight.