Topological Synthesis of Compliant Mechanisms Using a Level Set-Based Robust Formulation

摘要

Topology optimized compliant mechanisms have been widely utilized as the microdevices in microelectromechanical system. In applying topology optimization to design compliant mechanisms, one of the longstanding problems is that the obtained mechanisms often have highly localized compliance regions which make them very difficult to fabricate. In order to obtain manufacturable topology optimized compliant mechanisms, this paper presents a robust formulation based on the level set method. In the formulation, the goal is to maximize the objective for the worst case of three different structural configurations which are represented by three different level set functions. Not only the formulation can eliminate the highly localized compliance regions, it also can precisely control the minimum length scale in the obtained mechanisms. The validity and different aspects of the proposed formulation are demonstrated on several benchmark problems.