A Parameterization Approach for Compliance Analysis and Synthesis of Flexure Mechanisms

This paper presents an approach based on parameterized compliance for type synthesis of flexure mechanisms with serial, parallel, or hybrid topologies. The parameterized compliance matrixes have been derived for commonly used flexure elements which are significantly influenced by flexure parameters including material and geometric properties. Different parameters of flexure elements generate different degree of freedom (DOF) characteristic of types. Enlightened by the compliance analysis of flexure elements, a parameterization approach with detailed processes and steps is introduced in this paper to help analyze and synthesize flexure mechanisms in the case study as serial chains, parallel chains, and combination hybrid chains. For a hybrid flexure, finite element modeling simulations results are compared to analytical compliance elements characters. Within linear deformations, the maximum compliance errors of analytical models are less than 6% compared with FE models. The final goal of this work is to provide a parameterized approach for type synthesis of flexure mechanisms that can be used to configure and change the parameters of flexure mechanisms to achieve desired DOF requirements of types initially.