Research on the improvement of efficiency in the manufacturing industry is underdeveloped partly because of the ambiguous objectives of the technical development of efficiencies in terms of energy consumption reduction. Consequently, the technical development of high-efficiency techniques that consider the whole manufacturing system is rarely addressed in industrial research. For this reason, this report aims to find the patterns in, and the definitions of, the technologies that will lead to efficiency improvement in the entire manufacturing industry by thoroughly investigating the literature about energy consumption reduction strategies, energy policies, and the state-of-the-art for energy-saving methods that are being pursued currently in several major countries. Through this study, the necessity and importance of the foregoing three items have been identified, and a way of defining the productivities of an energy-saving manufacturing system distinct from those of conventional manufacturing systems was attempted. It is also shown that the development of energy-saving and energy-harvesting technologies for all industrial sectors has emerged as a herald of economic growth in the near future.

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Nanopositioning using piezoelectric actuation and a flexure mechanism is one of most common methods for nanometre-scale positioning. Generally, flexure mechanism nanopositioners have been made from metal. Thus, their application to various environments needs careful consideration with regard to corrosion and circumference interference. In this study, we propose the concept of a chip-like polymeric flexure-based nanopositioner equipped with piezoelectric actuation. In its design, motion performance was predicted using finite element analysis of deformation and stress, and injection mouldability was considered through an injection moulding simulation to allow for fabrication by injection moulding. A cyclic olefin copolymer nanopositioner was fabricated using a mesoscale injection moulding process. Experiments demonstrated that the developed nanopositioner had a travel range of 15 µm with high linearity and it could be successfully controlled by a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) algorithm including a low-pass filter with a root mean square control error of 3 nm.

We present a novel fabrication technique of a miniaturized out-of-plane compliant bistable mechanism (OBM) by microinjection molding (MM) and assembling. OBMs are mostly in-plane monolithic devices containing delicate elastic elements fabricated in metal, plastic, or by a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) process. The proposed technique is based on stacking two out-of-plane V-beam structures obtained by mold fabrication and MM of thermoplastic polyacetal resin (POM) and joining their centers and outer frames to construct a double V-beam structure. A copper alloy mold insert was machined with the sectional dimensions of the V-beam cavities. Next, the insert was re-machined to reduce dimensional errors caused by part shrinkage. The V-beam structure was injection-molded at a high temperature. Gradually elongated short-shots were obtained by increasing pressure, showing the symmetrical melt filling through the V-beam cavities. The as-molded structure was buckled elastically by an external-force load but showed a monostable behavior because of a higher unconstrained buckling mode. The double V-beam device assembled with two single-molded structures shows clear bistability. The experimental force-displacement curve of the molded structure is presented for examination. This work can potentially contribute to the fabrication of architected materials with periodic assembly of the plastic bistable mechanism for diverse functionalities, such as energy absorption and shape morphing.

the spring constant of the completely replicated ortho-planar micro-springs were measured and compared with the FEA results.

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