Welcome to this installment of MC² on Springs & Retaining Rings!
Springs and retaining rings are mechanical components essential to a vast array of consumer, medical, electronic, and industrial-grade designs. Increasingly engineered to specific applications, springs maintain tension, compression, or torsional loading on assemblies of all sizes as a way to ensure certain return setpoints or performance characteristics. In contrast, retaining rings — whether tapered section, constant section, or spiral — are a subset of removable fasteners that engage some grooved portion of a design’s housing or shaft to hold that subassembly together. Due to the similarities of their physical scale, manufacture, and phase at which they’re integrated into machines or workpieces, springs and retaining rings are often considered together.
Detailed in this Motion Control Classroom are spring and retaining-ring subtypes and their uses; calculations commonly used in their specification; and the metals, composites, and manufacturing techniques that have helped maximize their performance in cutting-edge applications.