A Piezo-Driven Compliant Nanopositioning Stage with Large Stroke for Micro/Nano Manipulation

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents the design, analysis, and testing of a single-axis compliant nanopositioning stage with large stroke driven by piezoelectric actuator for micro/nano manipulation. In the developed stage, a hybrid displacement amplifier integrating two kinds of flexure-based input/output decoupling modules have been developed to achieve a large stroke and precise positioning. The analytical modelling and finite element analysis are given to validate the mechanical performance and a prototype of the proposed stage is fabricated for performance tests. The experimental results show that the developed stage has the travel stroke of 214 μm with a resolution of 8 nm. It is demonstrated that the stage can be adequate for micro/nano manipulation.

Survey on Recent Designs of Compliant Micro-/Nano-Positioning Stages

“…The maximum stroke of an actuator is fixed and limited, especially for PEA, the stroke of which is only 0.1% to 0.2% of the length of the piezoelectric material [54,55]. Once a larger stroke is desired, the available solutions include reselecting the actuator with a larger stroke, using more actuators in series or using a stroke amplifier.…”

“…Clark et al [74] designed a pure rotation stage with the use of a bridge amplifier and two three-level lever amplifiers. Zhang et al [55] and Tzou et al [75] both used two lever amplifiers in symmetry to obtain the amplified stroke, and then, a half-bridge amplifier was used to generate linear motion. Besides, Zhang and Xu [76] used lever amplifiers to amplify the output of the bridge amplifier, so as to increase the workspace of a 3-PSS (prismatic-spherical-spherical) parallel flexure stage.…”