Advanced magnetic zipper for industrial and consumer applications

Conventional mechanical zippers find manifold applications for luggage, clothing or even industrial applications. However, their design features significant disadvantages. In particular, they require the use of both hands by the user to align the ends of the garment and lock the insertion pin into the slider. This mechanism can be prone to jamming and failure and more generally requires the user to free his or her hands. The user must further use one or both hands to move the slider along the length of the zipper to join it together.

Novel approaches solve this problem by replacing mechanical teeth elements with permanent magnetic elements (see Figure 1 a). Mediated by magnetic forces, opposing pairs from both rows establish a strong connection that is detachable with a peeling motion familiar to traditional zippers and thereby intuitive to the user.

Furthermore, magnetic zippers feature intrinsically an automatic closing mechanism. When two opposing elements come into contact, neighboring elements follow and the zipper closes along its entire length with enormous speed and accuracy. The user may initiate this motion by simply touching one magnetic element to another.

However, conventional designs for magnetic zippers fail to compensate for misaligned starting pairs and do not hinder undesired automatic closings resulting from chance contacts between both sides of the zipper.