Construction of Compliant Mechanisms

Abstract

Following the design of flexible elements in Chap. 3, their integration is further discussed in this section, which eventually leads to the construction of compliant mechanisms. The typical integration type of flexible elements includes serial, parallel and hybrid. Since the hybrid configuration is always a mixture of the first two types, this chapter will focus on evaluating the serial and parallel integration of flexible elements. Then compliant mechanisms are constructed in forms of their compliance/stiffness matrices. For a compliant mechanism in the serial configuration, its compliance matrix is derived; in contrast, the stiffness matrix is formulated for a compliant mechanism in the parallel configuration. Particularly, considering the difference between single-DOF and multi-DOF flexible elements, their integration formulations are also derived separately in both configurations. Further based on the development of compliance/stiffness matrices, several key design problems of compliant mechanisms are discussed, and they will be addressed in the following chapters.