Ground Beam Structure Based Joint Stiffness Controlling Method for the Design of Compliant Mechanism

바닥 보 구조 기반 조인트 강성 조절법을 이용한 컴플라이언트 메커니즘의 설계

Topology optimization has been widely used in many research areas due to its ability in providing intial designs for the problems with complex boundary conditions. This also has been useful in compliant mechanisms, but resulting layouts may not be immediately manufacturable because they usually consist of members with varying widths and shapes. Also, there occurs some numerical difficulties such as checkerboards or hinge patterns which result from 1-node connection, and intermediate values which make the manufacturing of the designed structure difficult. Though there are many remedies given to avoid this problems, they cannot be prevented. One may avoid this difficulty by employing uniform ground beams and explicit hinge joints. The proposed method is to connect uniform ground beams with elastic short-beam hinge joints. By choosing the widths of short beams as design variables, dominant deformations can occur mainly by flexible joints having intermediate widths. Unlike the conventional methods used for compliance minimization, intermediate widths must appear in compliant mechanism design problems. Also, the present approach does not encounter the problem of one-point hinges.