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Journalism of Courage
At the Indian Institute of Sciences Mechanical Engineering building,Professor GK Ananthasuresh talks about compliant mechanisms. Twisting a blue plastic model into protein helices,he says,Compliance implies yielding to something. In design,strength and stiffness are two different things. Often,one must yield and yet be strong. A mechanical engineer interested in flexible structures and their applications in everything from biology to avionics to agriculture,Professor Ananthasuresh is one of the nine scientists to receive the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for 2010.
In the six years he has been at IIScafter eight years at the University of Pennsylvania,UShe has led research here in compliant mechanisms to replace hard materials traditionally held together by joints,most notably at the micromachine level. His patents include a low-cost one-mm intracranial pressure sensor for the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences,a microchip holder and laparoscopic surgical cameras. A lot of our work here is to develop deformable mechanisms with a single degree of freedom, he says,pointing to the shape-optimised spindly plastic models on his table.
The idea of a structure without joints,however,can be applied to an object as large as an airplane wingthe subject of the masters thesis of one of his students. An aircraft can take off and land more efficiently if its wings can morph like birds wings according to flying conditions,instead of having flaps on them. The concept is at work everywhere,Ananthasuresh says,citing the example of Norman Borlaugs dwarf wheat variety which has been found to resist wind better. It is not more resistant because it is short,but rather because of the Rht gene present in it which makes it more compliant, he says. The mechanical engineering lab is now looking at working with farmers to develop micro soil moisture sensors.
