Rashed Al-Rashed

W6 Seek&Geek: Snap Fit Buttons

For this week, I decided to take a look at one of the tools that helped me through
the quals studying process – the notecard holder. In particular, I decided to take a
closer look at the button that held the notecard holder shut, with the goal of estimating
how much force it would take to engage the button.
 The bottom half of the button consists of four legs, each of which has a bump at
the end of it. When the top half of the button is brought into contact with the bottom, with
the inner radius of the top half forcing each of the legs to deform. The legs eventually
make it past the lip of the top half, snapping into place and providing tactile feedback
indicating that the legs have engaged.
 As seen above, I modeled the legs as cantilevered beams, with a known
deformation imposed through geometry. From this, I got an estimate for the force
applied in terms of the material’s modulus of elasticity. I looked up sales listings for
similar buttons, and found them to commonly be made of polyoxymethylene, or POM,
which has a Young’s Modulus of approximately 2500 MPa, leading to an estimated
Fapplied of 20 N.
In order to verify this, I placed the notecard holder on a weight scale and pressed
until the button snapped shut, recording the force measured right before impact. I took 6
measurements per button, with the resulting measured force being 6.2 ± 0.4 N and
12.5 ± 0.5 N for each of the buttons. While these results are not too far off from the
estimated value, it’s surprising to see such a difference in the force required to actuate
each of the two buttons. This particular notecard holder was a spare and did not see
much use, so I do not think the disparity comes from wear. One possibility is lax
tolerances on critical dimensions. In this case, those dimensions would be the length
and thickness of the beams, since both scale to the third power with respect to total
force.Using the equations above, the difference of 2x between the two forces would
represent a difference in beam thickness from 0.8mm to 1mm, which is a fairly
significant variation in thickness. The last possibility I considered, and perhaps the most
likely, is the possibility of creep. If one of the buttons was left engaged for a long time,
then it’s possible that uneven creep is the source of the disparity.
References:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/10-mm-Plastic-Snap-Button-
for_1929431053.html
https://www.matbase.com/material-categories/natural-and-synthetic-
polymers/thermoplastics/engineering-polymers/material-properties-of-
polyoxymethylene-homopolymer-pom-h.html#properties