<p style='text-indent:20px;'>This research provides a design for complaint constant-force mechanism employing leaf-spring-like beam with variable stiffness to address the negative stroke underutilization issue of bistable beam. By designing compression at each given displacement and ramp slope, this technique allows constant force potentially take full utilization beam's component. Innova...

Evolution of non-equilibrium systems towards equilibrium is governed by the second law of thermodynamics. For example, in the previous section we showed that for an adiabatically isolated system entropy must increase in any spontaneous change and reaches a maximum in equilibrium. What about out of equilibrium systems that are not adiabatically isolated and which may also be subject to external ...