Chained Beam-Constraint-Model (CBCM): A Powerful Tool for Modeling Large and Complicated Deflections of Flexible Beams in Compliant Mechanisms

Abstract

Modeling large deflections has been one of the most fundamental problems in the research community of compliant mechanisms. Although many methods are available, there still exists a need for a method that is simple, accurate, and can be applied to a vast variety of large deflection problems. Based on the beam constraint model (BCM), we propose a new method for modeling large deflections called chained BCM (CBCM), which divides a flexible beam into a few elements and models each element by BCM. It is demonstrated that CBCM is capable of modeling various large and complicated deflections of flexible beams in compliant mechanisms. In general, CBCM obtains accurate results with no more than 6 BCM elements, thus is more efficient than most of the other discretization-based methods.