Synthesis of compliant mechanisms with selective compliance – An advanced procedure

Abstract

By means of compliant mechanisms, given deformations can be realized in a controlled manner, in order to fulfill the typical task of conventional mechanisms. Compliant mechanisms with distributed compliance show large flexible areas and can therefore divert from the desired, mechanism-like behavior. Selective compliant mechanisms are advanced mechanisms with distributed compliance which nevertheless come close to such a behavior. In this paper, a new approach to the synthesis of this type of compliant mechanisms is presented. Compared to previous synthesis methods, this approach is more suitable for the synthesis of mechanisms with many output degrees of freedom, since the optimization process is more stable. With this new synthesis approach, an incremental linearization of the optimization problem is performed, which allows for the use of a linear optimization algorithm. The new synthesis approach is tested with two examples of compliant mechanisms with a few output degrees of freedom and a shape adaptive mechanism with many output degrees of freedom.