A novel compact tilt stage with additive manufacturable spatial flexure mechanism driven by asymmetric stiffness

Abstract

The compliant mechanism based precision motion stage has emerged as one of the key enabling components in many advanced engineering applications. It is particularly challenging to design high precision spatial motion stages with a compact size and large motion stroke. In this research, we propose an additive-manufacturing-friendly spatial flexure mechanism based tilt precision motion stage with compact structure, which is composed of bionic structures of an S-Layer and a J-Layer connected in parallel. Thanks to the asymmetric stiffness configuration of the S-Layer and J-Layer, the end-effector of the tilt stage can deflect around X-axis, which is significantly simpler than conventional tip-tile stage designs in the literature. A theoretical model is also established based on Castigliano’s second theorem to analyze the mechanical performance and predict the angular output. Comprehensive FEA (Finite Element Analysis) simulations and experimental verifications are provided to evaluate the proposed design, where comparative studies are also given to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.