Undergraduate student Sterling Anderson and ME Professor Dr. Brian Jensen received the "Compliant Mechanisms Award: Applications" in recognition of a prize winning paper. The award is presented annually to the authors of the best paper demonstrating an application of compliant mechanisms. The award was received at the ASME Mechanisms & Robotics Conference held in Brooklyn, New York, from August 4th-5th. This conference is the premier conference for work in compliant mechanisms, with papers from many researchers all over the world. This is the second year that BYU has won the award.
The awarded paper is titled "Viscoelastic Damping of Ortho-Planar Springs." The paper reports on experiments performed to measure the damping of a compliant spring combined with a layer of rubber to increase the damping ratio. Dr. Jensen and Mr. Anderson were able to show a three-fold increase in the damping ratio without significantly increasing the thickness of the system. This technology may be useful in creating vehicle suspensions made from compact compliant mechanisms. Mr. Anderson was an undergraduate student when he worked on the project and is currently a graduate student at MIT.