Abstract
A total stroke of an opening or closing motion of a hinge mechanism in a folder-type mobile phone is composed of two portions. In the first portion, human fingers act a force to open or close the folder. In this portion, the rotating folder compresses the coil spring installed in the mechanism. In the last portion, this compressed coil spring generates a torque to rotate the folder. The main merit of this study is that we have designed a hinge mechanism to be operated by a uniform torque in the first portion of the total stroke. The uniform torque means that it is constant along the folder's swing angle. This mechanism will give softer feeling to human fingers. A pair of contours in the mechanism plays an important role. It transforms rotation into translation in the first portion; on the other hand, it transforms translation into rotation in the last portion. In this study, we have developed an algorithm to obtain the pair of contour curves. We divided the total contour curves into finite sub-intervals. Assuming that the curves in every sub-interval are parabolas, we have obtained the coefficients of them by solving systems of nonlinear equations recursively.
