Abstract
Abstract. This paper presents the mechanical design, analysis, fabrication, and testing procedures of a new large-range microgripper which is based on a flexible hinge structure. The uniqueness of the gripper is that the gripper arms not only provide large gripping range but also deliver approximately rectilinear movement as the displacement in nonworking direction is extremely small. The large gripping range is enabled by a mechanism design based on dual-stage flexure amplifier to magnify the stroke of piezoelectric actuator. The first-stage amplifier is a modified version of the Scott Russell (SR) mechanism and the second-stage amplifier contains a parallel mechanism. The displacement amplification ratio of the modified SR mechanism in the gripper has been enlarged to 3.56 times of the conventional design. Analytical static models of the gripper mechanism are developed and validated through finite-element analysis (FEA) simulation. Results show that the gripping range is over 720 µm with a resonant frequency of 70.7 Hz and negligible displacement in nonworking direction. The total amplification ratio of the input displacement is 16.13. Moreover, a prototype of the gripper is developed by using aluminium 7075 for experimental testing. Experimental results validate the analytical model and FEA simulation results. The proposed microgripper can be employed in various microassembly applications such as pick-and-place of optical fibre.
Highlights
With the rapid development in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and precision engineering, extensive research on automatic micromanipulation and microassembly technology has been carried out
Motivated by the aforementioned review, this paper presents the mechanical design, fabrication, and testing procedures of a new large-range compliant microgripper, which is based on flexure-hinge structure
In order to verify the analytical models as developed in the previous subsection, finite-element analysis (FEA) simulation is carried out with ANSYS to test the performance of the gripper
Summary
With the rapid development in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and precision engineering, extensive research on automatic micromanipulation and microassembly technology has been carried out. Motivated by the aforementioned review, this paper presents the mechanical design, fabrication, and testing procedures of a new large-range compliant microgripper, which is based on flexure-hinge structure. The main advantage of the gripper is that the gripper arms provide large-range output displacement and produce approximately rectilinear movement, because the nonworking directional displacement is extremely small. In this design, the gripper is actuated by only one PZT actuator which is fixed in the middle of the device. The monolithic components are connected by using circular notch hinges (Merken et al, 2004) With this SR mechanism, the gripper can provide both amplified and approximately rectilinear output. Detailed design procedures are presented in the following parts of the paper
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