ON THE EFFICIENT SIMULATION OF THE FLEXIBLE MULTIBODY DYNAMICS OF FLEXURE BASED PRECISION MECHANISMS USING SUPERELEMENTS

摘要

In precision engineering, flexure hinges are commonly used for the absence of friction, hysteresis and backlash. These hinges require high compliance in their driving directions and high stiffness in supporting directions. Because many modern applications require the flexure hinges to be well-behaved in a large range of motion, the hinge should maintain its support stiffness even for deformations far outside of its linear stroke. As the support stiffness of standard hinges dramatically drops with deflection, shape and topology optimization is used to design more sophisticated flexure hinges that meet the stiffness requirement. For this purpose, it is common to develop finite element models of the flexure hinges.