Frequency doubling in elastic mechanisms using buckling of microflexures

Abstract

Microtransmission mechanisms made of elastic materials present an opportunity for exploring scalable mechanical systems integrated with sophisticated functionalities. This paper shows how the fundamentally limited range of motion in elastic mechanisms can be circumvented to create a frequency doubling functionality analog to angular velocity doubling in classical gears. The proposed mechanism utilizes the elastic deformation of its internal architecture and buckling of microflexures to perform frequency doubling kinematics. We demonstrate this by the fabrication of a microtransmission device for application in mechanical wrist watches. A key benefit of the proposed method is that such a transmission system can be integrated and fabricated as an embedded part of microarchitected materials to boost the frequency characteristics of energy storage, actuators, and inertial sensors to perform adequately for different applications.