No abstract

Flexure-based compliant mechanisms are becoming increasingly promising in precision engineering, robotics, and other applications due to the excellent advantages of no friction, no backlash, no wear, and minimal requirement of assembly. Because compliant mechanisms have inherent coupling of kinematic-mechanical behaviors with large deflections and/or complex serial-parallel configurations, the kinetostatic and dynamic analyses are challenging in comparison to their rigid-body counterparts. To address these challenges, a variety of techniques have been reported in a growing stream of publications. This paper surveys and compares the conceptual ideas, key advances, and applicable scopes, and open problems of the state-of-the-art kinetostatic and dynamic modeling methods for compliant mechanisms in terms of small and large deflections. Future challenges are discussed and new opportunities for extended study are highlighted as well. The presented review provides a guide on how to select suitable modeling approaches for those engaged in the field of compliant mechanisms.

Piezo-actuated, flexure hinge-based compliant mechanisms have been frequently used in precision engineering in the last few decades. There have been a considerable number of publications on modeling the displacement amplification behavior of rhombus-type and bridgetype compliant mechanisms. However, due to an unclear geometric approximation and mechanical assumption between these two flexures, it is very difficult to obtain an exact description of the kinematic performance using previous analytical models, especially when the designed angle of the compliant mechanisms is small. Therefore, enhanced theoretical models of the displacement amplification ratio for rhombus-type and bridge-type compliant mechanisms are proposed to improve the prediction accuracy based on the distinct force analysis between these two flexures. The energy conservation law and the elastic beam theory are employed for modeling with consideration of the translational and rotational stiffness. Theoretical and finite elemental results show that the prediction errors of the displacement amplification ratio will be enlarged if the bridge-type flexure is simplified as a rhombic structure to perform mechanical modeling. More importantly, the proposed models exhibit better performance than the previous models, which is further verified by experiments.

No abstract