Design and Analysis of a Sliding Panel Shape Morphing Mechanism System
A sliding panel shape morphing mechanism system is proposed. The said system is constructed by a number of segmented rigid panels that are allowed to slide relative to each other during shape morphing. In this paper, a method is presented for the design and analysis of the said system using a hexapod as a general-purpose driving system with six degrees-of-freedom. First, it is shown that a proper passive linkage system is required to connect a set of sliding panels to the base and moving platform of the hexapod. Each panel is made of a telescopic pair in the longitudinal direction and connected transversally with two adjacent panels through slots. Second, after modeling the entire system and formulating the constraints among the sliding panels, a search method is presented to determine the solutions that all the sliding panels can move without interference under a given hexapod motion. Further studies are also carried out to examine different shapes of the base and moving platform as well as different number of panels that can approximate a real application system, such as a morphing wing.