The moment it clicks!
Compliant structures are all around us and yet, so easily overlooked. What makes them interesting is they have a premise about them by engineers saying that they'll never wear out. Well, fun fact, FATIGUE! Everything wears out eventually. I first started noticing compliant structures at a very young age. Some encounters were possibly the first fidget boxes. I was given a jam jar lid with a Push logo on the top. If you pressed the lid down and it clicked, it signified that the jar had been tampered with and you shouldn’t buy it. Amazing to think this a simple solution that went unoticed by the masses and yet children everywhere spent hours clicking the tops of jam jar lids when totally bored, waiting for cable television to be invented.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here it is in true SHINee Tools fashion. A classic example of a compliant structure in its simplest form. When first pressed the side are forcing the central mass outwards until it reaches its its maximum states and flips over to the DARK SIDE other side.
Compliant structures are found in many other daily items such as mechanical metal switches, Childerens Jumping Toys and my personal favorite, Mole Grips (you’ll need to think about that one).
A rather interesting article can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0168218 I hope you find these structures as interesting and ingenious as I do.
Yours, The Enginer'd
