Investigation of Compliant Centrifugal Clutch Designs

Compliant centrifugal clutches can make centrifugal clutches feasible in cost and weight sensitive applications. This paper introduces new configurations of compliant centrifugal clutches, proposes pseudo-rigid-body models for their analysis, and presents torque capacity results for several prototypes. The results are also compared to those obtained from compliant centrifugal clutch designs already commercially available. While all four new clutch designs compare favorably to commercially available clutch configurations, the floating opposing arm (FOA) clutch demonstrated the highest torque capacity of all the configurations.