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When it comes to designing for user experience, motion control systems allow for safety and flexibility. These characteristics not only improve the durability and longevity of your product but also allow for:
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From the hotel room to the manufacturing floor, motion control system designs have fundamental impacts on our daily lives.
How?
Their smooth operation affects how customers perceive a purchase. Their efficiency impacts an employee’s work performance. Their design guides how users interact with a product.
Often unseen, a motion control system is best when it’s least thought of by a user. When a user notices it, it’s often because it isn’t working as well as it should. Their design should be front-of-mind for an engineer, working toward the best and easiest user experience possible.
Mechanical Motion Control Systems for Optimal Experiences
When it comes to designing for user experience, motion control systems allow for safety and flexibility. These characteristics not only improve the durability and longevity of your product but also allow for:
- Ease of accessibility
- Flexible designs
- Safety in all situations
1. Ease of Accessibility
Whether it’s a Murphy bed or an oven door in a hotel kitchen (or industrial kitchen), everyone should be able to open, close, and otherwise operate moving parts.
While cabinet doors are typically easy to operate, accessibility becomes more of a factor with heavier objects such as the oven door or manufacturing equipment. With heavier parts, spring-assisted hinges and counterbalance hinges are essential to making operating parts easy.
Spring-assisted hinges come in many different forms. They are used in many applications – everything from commercial oven doors to industrial manufacturing equipment. With properly designed hinges, heavy components are easily operated with just a few fingers. In addition, spring-assisted hinges upgrade safety (more on this later).
Counterbalance hinges use countering torque to manage the heaviness of a part. Like its spring-assisted relative, this type of hinge also comes in many forms and is used across a variety of applications. It’s most often paired with a part that must stay in a specific position, such as:
- Grill lids
- Tanning beds
- Cryogenic freezers
2. Flexible Designs
Hinges are flexible – both physically and in their design and price points.
Broken down into categories of good, better, and best, they are:
- Good: For an inexpensive weight-mitigating hinge, use gas spring-assisted hinges. However, they are prone to failure in high-heat or high-stress applications.
- Better: For a better experience, incorporate mechanical spring-assisted hinges for a higher degree of weight mitigation regardless of the environment. Spring-assisted hinges provide secure weight mitigation with no risk of explosion or failure due to high/low temperature or pressure.
- Best: Counterbalance hinges provide weight mitigation and allow users to partially open a heavy lid, countertop, or door and leave it partially opened. These motion control hinges allow you to specify exactly how softly they open or close, and at what degrees of motion.
3. Motion Control Systems for Safety in All Situations
No one likes using something that isn’t safe.
Effective motion control system design safety provides peace of mind for customers and employees.
Integrating counterbalance hinges with weight mitigation and motion control allows users to safely operate equipment with heavy lids or doors by decreasing the amount of force needed to lift or open them.
Mindful mechanical motion control system integration also reduces the risk of repetitive-motion injuries, which are a common concern for hospitality, health care, and factory workers, among others.
When users feel safer operating a product, they do it more often and in the way engineers intended.
See the safety features of our counterbalance hinge motion controls:
Improving Mechanical Motion Control System Designs
State-of-the-art hinges improve mechanical motion control system design for optimal ease of accessibility, flexibility, and safety. These hinge solutions are durable, long-lasting, and application-specific.
When integrated thoughtfully, they provide equipment users with the best experience possible – and probably without them even noticing.
Learn More About Hinges for Motion Control Design
Ask an engineer directly for motion control design tips to increase your equipment’s ease of accessibility. Contact us now:
This piece was originally published October 2021 and was recently updated to reflect industry trends.
