Showing papers by "Benliang Zhu published in 2014"
TL;DR: In this article, a method for designing the single-axis flexure hinges in the topology level is presented, where two kinds of hinges, the translational hinge and the revolute hinge, are studied.
Abstract: The design of compliant hinges has been extensively studied in the size and shape level in the literature. This paper presents a method for designing the single-axis flexure hinges in the topology level. Two kinds of hinges, that is, the translational hinge and the revolute hinge, are studied. The basic optimization models are developed for topology optimization of the translational hinge and the revolute hinge, respectively. The objective for topology optimization of flexure hinges is to maximize the compliance in the desired direction meanwhile minimizing the compliances in the other directions. The constraints for accomplishing the translational and revolute requirements are developed. The popular Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization method is used to find the optimal flexure hinge topology within a given design domain. Numerical results are performed to illustrate the validity of the proposed method.
43 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a new multi-objective formulation for topology synthesis of hinge-free compliant mechanisms is presented based on the SIMP method and a weighted sum formed objective function is developed by taking into consideration the input and output mean compliances.
Abstract: A new multi-objective formulation for topology synthesis of hinge-free compliant mechanisms is presented based on the SIMP method. A weighted sum formed objective function is developed by taking into consideration the input and output mean compliances. The weighting factors are set based on the information that is obtained from the previous iteration and automatically updated with each optimization iteration step. Shape sensitivity analysis is addressed. Some numerical examples are presented to illustrate the validity of the proposed method.
35 citations
TL;DR: An efficient algorithm is developed to solve the level set-based optimization problem for improving the computational efficiency of compliant mechanisms aimed at eliminating de facto hinges.
Abstract: This paper presents a two-step elastic modeling (TsEM) method for the topology optimization of compliant mechanisms aimed at eliminating de facto hinges. Based on the TsEM method, an alternative formulation is developed and incorporated with the level set method. An efficient algorithm is developed to solve the level set-based optimization problem for improving the computational efficiency. Two widely studied numerical examples are performed to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. The proposed formulation can prevent hinges from occurring in the resulting mechanisms. Further, the proposed optimization algorithm can yield fewer design iterations and thus it can improve the overall computational efficiency.
32 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a new level set-based multi-objective optimization method is proposed for topological design of hinge-free compliant mechanisms, where the flexibility requirement of compliant mechanisms is formulated by using the mutual energy.
Abstract: A new level set-based multi-objective optimization method is proposed for topological design of hinge-free compliant mechanisms. Firstly, the flexibility requirement of compliant mechanisms is formulated by using the mutual energy. Two types of mean compliance are developed to meet the stiffness requirement. Secondly, several objective functions are developed for designing hinge-free compliant mechanisms based on the weighting method in which a new scheme for determining weighting factors is used. Thirdly, several numerical examples are performed to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. It is shown that the resulting compliant mechanism configurations contain only strip-like members which are suitable for generating distributed compliance and decreasing stress concentration.
22 citations
17 Aug 2014
TL;DR: In this article, a pseudo-rigid-body model (PRBM) is proposed to find the optimal topology for flexure-based compliant mechanisms. But the topology of the PRBM is not considered in this paper.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel method for the topological synthesis of flexure-based compliant mechanisms. Such kind of mechanisms are usually obtained by replacing the kinematic pairs of existing rigid-body mechanisms with flexure hinges, which is often regarded as the rigid-body replacement approach. This approach uses the topologies from rigid-body mechanism and pays little attention to the selection of the optimal topology among them. The proposed method tries to find out the optimal topology directly from design problem, without referencing to the existing rigid-body mechanisms. The topology of the flexure-based compliant mechanisms is represented by the pseudo-rigid-body model (PRBM). The PRBM is expressed in a ground structure using an adjacency matrix. An analysis method based on the principle of minimum potential energy is introduced to evaluate the static performance of the PRBM candidates quantitatively. Using genetic algorithm (GA), the optimal PRBM can be found out according to the objective function that is based on the analysis results. The validity of the proposed method is tested on a single-input-output compliant mechanism design problem.Copyright © 2014 by ASME
13 citations
11 Mar 2014
TL;DR: In this paper, a numerical method for analyzing the pseudo-rigid-body model of compliant mechanisms based on finite elements and the principle of minimum potential energy is presented, and the proposed method is shown to be applicable to the case of finite-element compliant mechanisms.
Abstract: This paper presents a numerical method for analyzing the pseudo-rigid-body model of compliant mechanisms based on finite elements and the principle of minimum potential energy The proposed method
11 citations