Design and analysis of a spatial remote center of compliance mechanism

Abstract

This paper presents a novel monolithic spatial remote center of compliant orientation-adjusting mechanism to resolve the parallelism alignment problem in the application of micro/nanofabrication. The mechanism is combined by two leaf-type isosceles-trapezoidal flexure pivots in a parallel manner to enable the spatial rotations around a fixed remote center. Based on the stiffness matrix method, the static model of the compliant mechanism is constructed to directly give the compliance factors that completely define the elastic response of the mechanism. The locations of remote center of compliance are also analyzed for the compliant mechanism in different loading cases. The finite element analysis results are then given to validate the analytical model and the remote center locations. The deviation of the analytical approach is less than 7% with respect to the finite element analysis method. Using the analytical model, the influences of the geometry parameters on the compliance factors and the remote center locations are graphically evaluated to provide theoretical guidelines for the practical design. The spatial remote center of compliant mechanism has the advantage of simple structure, balance, compactness, and can achieve high precision of rotation during the orientation motions. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.