Steam-powered rocket motor drives prosthetic arm
7 September 2007 A team at Vanderbilt University has developed a
prosthetic arm powered by a miniaturised shuttle rocket motor that produces
10 times the power of current commercially-available arms.
|
Vanderbilt Professor Michael Goldfarb inspects
the rocket-powered prosthetic arm |
A prototype of this radical design has been successfully developed and
tested by a team of mechanical engineers at Vanderbilt University as part of
a $30 million US federal program to develop advanced prosthetic devices.
“Our design does not have superhuman strength or capability, but it is
closer in terms of function and power to a human arm than any previous
prosthetic device that is self-powered and weighs about the same as a
natural arm,” says Michael Goldfarb, the professor of mechanical engineering
who is leading the effort.
The prototype can lift (curl) about 20 to 25 pounds — three to four times
more than current commercial arms — and can do so three to four times
faster. “That means it has about 10 times as much power as other arms
despite the fact that the design hasn’t been optimized yet for strength or
power,” he says.
The mechanical arm also functions more naturally than previous models.
Conventional prosthetic arms have only two joints, the elbow and claw. By
comparison, the prototype’s wrist twists and bends and its fingers and thumb
open and close independently.
“Battery power has been adequate for the current generation of prosthetic
arms because their functionality is so limited that people don’t use them
much,” Goldfarb says. “The more functional the prosthesis, the more the
person will use it and the more energy it will consume.”
At a certain point, the weight of the batteries required to provide the
energy to operate the arm for a reasonable period becomes a problem. It was
the poor power-to-weight ratio of the batteries that drove Goldfarb to look
for alternatives in 2000 while he was working on a previous exoskeleton
project for DARPA. He decided to miniaturize the monopropellant rocket motor
system that is used by the space shuttle for manoeuvring in orbit. His
adaptation impressed the Johns Hopkins researchers, so they offered him $2.7
million in research funding to apply this approach to the development of a
prosthetic arm.
Goldfarb’s power source is about the size of a pencil and contains a
special catalyst that causes hydrogen peroxide to burn. When hydrogen
peroxide burns, it produces pure steam. The steam is used to open and close
a series of valves. The valves are connected to the spring-loaded joints by
belts made of a special monofilament used in appliance handles and aircraft
parts. A small sealed canister of hydrogen peroxide that easily fits in the
upper arm can provide enough energy to power the device for 18 hours of
normal activity.
One of the researchers’ concerns was protecting the wearer and others in
close proximity from the heat generated by the device. By covering the
hottest parts with special insulating plastic, they were able to reduce
surface temperatures enough so they are safe to touch. The steam exhaust was
also a problem, which they decided to handle in as natural a fashion as
possible: by venting it through a porous cover, where it evaporates like
natural perspiration. “The amount of water involved is about the same as a
person would normally sweat from their arm in a warm day,” Goldfarb says.
The Vanderbilt team built a first prototype that ran on condensed gas.
This allowed them to test the basic design and address the basic problems of
control, leakage and noise. After getting it to work properly on “cold gas,”
the engineers created a second prototype with the hydrogen peroxide power
source, which produces steam at 450°F. They quickly determined that the
material they had used for the belts couldn’t take the heat.
After an extended process of trial and error before they found a
commercial material that was strong enough and could withstand the high
temperatures. After solving this and a number of other smaller problems, the
researchers got the second prototype working properly by the end of June.
The Vanderbilt arm is the most unconventional of three prosthetic arms
under development by the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)
program. The other two are being designed by researchers at the Advanced
Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who head the
program. Those arms are powered by batteries and electric motors. At the
same time, the program is supporting teams of neuroscientists at the
University of Utah, California Institute of Technology and the
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago who are developing advanced methods for
controlling the arms by connecting them to nerves in the users’ bodies or
brains. To top
Save this page on del.icio.us
|