Design and development of compliant mechanisms for electromagnetic force balance sensor

Compared with the lever-type amplifier, the rhombus-type amplifier has attracted more attention by virtue of large displacement amplification ratio, compact structure, and linear output displacement. In this paper, a novel electromagnetic force balance sensor (EFBS) based on the rhombus-type amplifier is presented to measure the mass with high precision. First, the structure and operating principle of the EFBS are described, and the requirements for the design and manufacture of the amplifier are put forward. Then, the analytical models of the two-stage rhombus-type amplifier are given out, and two guiding mechanisms are analyzed and modeled. Furthermore, the validity of the established model is verified by finite element analysis (FEA). Thanks to the theoretical guidance, an electromagnetic force balance sensor based on the two-stage rhombus-type amplifier and double parallelogram flexure mechanism is designed and tested. The experimental results demonstrate that the developed EFBS can measure the mass of the objects with high precision, and also verifies the correctness of the analytical model. This provides a new concept for the structural design of the EFBS.