Design and analysis of asymmetric metallic bellow actuator for Prosthetic Application

Soft robotics plays an important role in the field of prosthetic hands, which can help and assist the differently- abled with various daily basic needs, includes holding, placing, and picking objects. Soft actuators are the ones that make these actions possible. Various symmetric and Asymmetric bellow actuators with different rubber materials are currently used for this purpose. This paper focuses on the design and analysis study of two types of asymmetric metallic bellow actuators (AMBA). One is a circular symmetric bellow actuator of stainless steel(SS316) which has been transformed to an asymmetric bellow actuator by attaching a stainless steel wire on one side of the symmetric circular bellow and the other is an asymmetric semi-circular design using Nickel200(Ni200 UNS N02200) which can be used to replace the rubber bellows. The models were designed using Ansys Space Claim modeler and the Finite Element Analysis was performed using ANSYS. Understanding the characteristics of both the bellows was done. The results confirmed that better bending angles can be obtained using the semi-circular design than those of the circular symmetric wire attached design.