Lehigh Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series: Dr. Jared Butler

Compliant mechanisms (devices that achieve motion and force transmission through the elastic deformation of their components) are enabling new classes of engineered systems that are lighter, more precise, and inherently joint-free. In biomedical devices, they eliminate wear interfaces that shed particles or trap pathogens, streamline sterilization, and deliver reliable performance from surgical instruments to micro-scale implantables. Drawing inspiration from origami, our designs fold, deploy, and conform to tight spaces, leveraging geometric efficiency for compact, robust, and application-tailored motion. Advances in additive manufacturing, including voxel-level property control and emerging metal processes, are expanding what’s possible, enabling monolithic structures with embedded functionality, tunable stiffness, and intricate internal architectures that traditional methods cannot match. Dr. Butler's talk will explore recent work from the Penn State Mechanism Collective at the intersection of folding, flexure, and fabrication, highlighting how compliant mechanism theory, origami-based design, and additive processes converge to create deployable, sterilizable, and high-performance systems for applications spanning the operating room to the outer atmosphere.