Methodology of Compliant Mechanisms and its Current Developments in Applications: A Review

Abstract

Traditional rigid-body mechanisms consist of a number of components to implement their functions. Therefore they face problems such as backlash, wear, increase in part-count, weight, assembly cost and time, regular maintenance. Reducing these problems will help in increasing mechanism performance and cost reduction. Recently, there are several examples of compliant mechanisms that have been designed and widely used in various fields such as for adaptive structures, biomedical, hand-held tools, components in transportations, MEMS and robotics. However, the largest challenge was relative difficulty in analyzing and designing compliant mechanisms. Two approaches known in the literature for the systematic synthesis of compliant mechanisms are the kinematics-based approach and the structural optimisation based approach.

Foundations for Soft, Smart Matter by Active Mechanical Metamaterials

“…Compliant mechanisms inspire novel solutions for applications including medical devices, robotics, microelectromechanical systems, and deployable structures. [150][151][152][153][154][155] Baker and Howell [156] designed a compliant bistable micromechanism controlled by thermal actuation. Moulton and Ananthasuresh [157] explored an electro-thermal-compliant actuation (ETC) approach for MEMS devices, where the mechanism underlying shape control is differential thermal expansion tuned by the MEMS shape.…”

“…Compliant mechanisms inspire novel solutions for applications including medical devices, robotics, microelectromechanical systems, and deployable structures. [ 150–155 ]…”

Emerging Technologies in Displacement Amplification of Lever and Bridge-Type Compliant Mechanism: A Review Article

“…The complaint mechanism consists of both mixtures of flexural materials integrated with stiff components in selected segments to control deformation and force of the compliant mechanism. The compliant mechanism has more advantages than traditional rigid-body mechanism such as reduced number of components [5] which removes the assembly process of mechanism, no need of lubrication because of joint-less mechanism, stress relief and potential energy storage in structure [6]. Complaint mechanism has various advantages likes continuous and smooth displacement [7], significantly less or eliminated backlash [8] and infinite resolution [9].…”

Structural optimization for flexure-based parallel mechanisms – Towards achieving optimal dynamic and stiffness properties

“…The kinematic approach is an established way to synthesize compliant mechanisms with multi-degrees-of-freedom [5,6]. This approach uses a combination of flexural and rigid components such that the compliant mechanism can achieve its desired kinematics.…”