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Concept
Compliant mechanism
Summary
In mechanical engineering, a compliant mechanism is a flexible mechanism that achieves force and motion transmission through elastic body deformation. It gains some or all of its motion from the relative flexibility of its members rather than from rigid-body joints alone. These may be monolithic (single-piece) or jointless structures. Some common devices that use compliant mechanisms are backpack latches and paper clips. One of the oldest examples of using compliant structures is the bow and arrow.
Compliant mechanisms are usually designed using two techniques:
Kinematic analysis can be used to design a compliant mechanism by creating a pseudo-rigid-body model of the mechanism. In this model, flexible segments are modeled as rigid links connected to revolute joints with torsional springs. Other structures can be modeled as a combination of rigid links, springs, and dampers.
In this method, computational methods are used for topology optimization of the structure. Expected loading and desired motion and force transmission are input and the system is optimized for weight, accuracy, and minimum stresses. More advanced methods first optimize the underlying linkage configuration and then optimize the topology around that configuration. Other optimization techniques focus topology optimization of the flexure joints by taking as input a rigid mechanism and replacing all the rigid joints with optimized flexure joints. To predict the behavior of the structure, finite-element stress analysis is done to find deformation and stresses over the entire structure.
Other techniques are being conceived to design these mechanisms. Compliant mechanisms manufactured in a plane that have motion emerging from said plane are known as lamina emergent mechanisms.
Compliant structures are often created as an alternative to similar mechanisms that use multiple parts. There are two main advantages for using compliant mechanisms:
Low cost: A compliant mechanism can usually be fabricated into a single structure, which is a dramatic simplification in the number of required parts.
Official source
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Related concepts (1)
Kinematics
Kinematics is a subfield of physics, developed in classical mechanics, that describes the motion of points, bodies (objects), and systems of bodies (groups of objects) without considering the forces that cause them to move. Kinematics, as a field of study, is often referred to as the "geometry of motion" and is occasionally seen as a branch of mathematics. A kinematics problem begins by describing the geometry of the system and declaring the initial conditions of any known values of position, velocity and/or acceleration of points within the system.