A roller posture adjustment device with remote-center-of-motion for roll-to-roll printed electronics

Nonuniform web tension has a great negative effect on product quality of roll-to-roll printed electronics. In this paper, a roller posture adjustment device with remote-center-of-motion (RCM) characteristic is proposed to guarantee web tension uniformity. The device combines a high-stiffness spherical air bearing (SAB) and a multi-degree-of-freedom flexure-based mechanism. The nonuniform web tension in lateral direction can be divided into an equivalent force and two equivalent moments. The equivalent moments are caused by the nonuniformity of the web tension. By adjusting the roller angle around y and z-axes, the equivalent moments can be eliminated to guarantee the web tension uniformity. The multi-DOF flexure-based mechanism is composed of a linear mechanism, a rotary mechanism and a 3-DOF off-plane mechanism. Besides, the RCM characteristic of the proposed device is realized to eliminate extra parasitic movement when the roller posture is changed. Based on pseudo-rigid-body model (PRBM) method, the theoretical analysis is conducted to evaluate the kinematics, stiffness and dynamics of the device. Moreover, the parameter optimization is conducted to maximize the first two resonance frequencies of the system. After that, finite element analysis is conducted to validate the established models. Finally, a prototype of the proposed device is fabricated performance verification. The experimental results show that the proposed device has a workspace of 10.22 mrad and 8.16 mrad about two working axes with center shifts of the RCM point less than 0.75%, which demonstrate the superior property of the proposed device.