Design of a mechanism that allows to combine both soft-closing and push-to-open technologies in drawers for furniture.
Soft-closing refers to a mechanism that by means of a damper dissipates the residual kinetic energy of the drawer in the final part of the closing stroke. A spring assures that a closing force is applied to overcome the damper.
Push-to-open refers to a mechanism that transfers kinetic energy to the drawer when this is slightly pushed inwards. A latch-type mechanism functions as a trigger and a spring stores the energy need.
In principle these to principles are not compatible. Soft-closing relies on tensioning a spring when manually opening the drawer so that this can be used to overcome the damper when closing it. To the contrary the push-to-open is compressed until the drawer is opened. If this second spring has the enough energy to overcome the one from the soft-closing mechanism, the tensioned spring from the soft-closing device will not have enough energy to compress the one from the push-to-open (the damper dissipates the kinetic energy provided by the user when closing the drawer, so the system cannot rely on this input of kinetic energy). Therefore, a mechanism that makes both systems compatible is develop.
This project was awarded with a "MATRÍCULA DE HONOR", and best mechanical engineering BsC graduation project of 2015 at the University of Navarra. Follow this link to the publication of this project.
Video showing the working principle of the first iteration. Note that owing to an incompatibility, springs couldn´t be represented in these