QUASI-STATIC RESPONSE OF PLANAR PARALLEL-CONNECTION FLEXURE HINGES MECHANISM

Abstract

This paper deals with the quasi-static response analysis of planar parallel-connection flexure hinge mechanism. The flexure hinges are discretized by using the pseudo-rigid-body method. According to this approach, the elastic properties of the flexure hinges are modelled by introducing the springs of appropriate stiffnesses in the joint elements with three degrees of freedom which connect the light rigid segments. The mass of the flexure hinges is neglected due to their dimensions with respect to the rigid body. The small in-plane deformations of the flexure hinges was analyzed. The displacements of the arbitrarily selected point of the rigid body are obtained in the symbolic form. The proposed algorithm is universal, so the mechanism with the arbitrarily selected number, type or orientation of flexure hinges should be analyzed. The symmetric corner-filleted flexure hinge and circular flexure hinge were used in numerical example. The obtained results are more accurate than the results of similar methods from literature. Furthermore, the proposed method is numerically more efficient than the above mentioned similar methods.