A compliance-based parameterization approach for type 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 matrices 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 with the case study as serial chains, parallel chains, and combination hybrid chains. For a hybrid flexure, the results of finite element (FE) modeling simulations are compared to analytical compliance elements characteristic. Under linear deformations, the maximum compliance errors of analytical models are less than 6% compared with the FE models. The final goal of this work is to provide a parameterized approach for type synthesis of flexure mechanisms, which is used to configure and change the parameters of flexure mechanisms to achieve the desired DOF requirements of types initially.