For my Master’s project, the goal of my work was to create a method to select an appropriate damping, design and build the dampers, characterize the resulting dampers, and, finally, validate the work in an experimental study in vivo with people with an above-knee amputation. Some of this work is already published, and you can click the buttons below to be redirected to the journal or conference publications. Below, I have added some photographs of the components.
Number of rings defined the damping resistance of each prototype
A stack of discs
The internal components
The damper shell
The resistance is created by shearing viscous liquid between discs, which were made using a waterjet
Each of these components was CNC machined using the mill and the lathe
Experimental setup ("the damping dyno") to characterize the damping for each prototype
A motor rotates the damper and the S-type load cell measures the moment created by the damper.
A coupler connecting to the damper
Attachment to the S-type load cell