Multifarious flexure-based displacement amplifiers have been proposed and studied in the past decades, showing importance in many industrial fields, such as bioengineering, optical instruments, and semiconductor technology. Displacement amplifiers provide precise motion and large stroke through a simple and low-cost way compared with other piezoelectric actuators. Those merits have opened a door for new and advanced micro devices with unprecedented performance. This paper aims to proffer a comprehensive review on the design, modeling, characteristics, and applications of flexure-based displacement amplifiers, following by pointing out the inherent drawbacks in this research area such as amplification ratio limit, parasitic motion, low lateral stiffness, low natural frequency, and discussing existing solutions and some potential research directions in those topics. Finally, a summary is concluded and the future development perspectives of the displacement amplifiers are discussed. This review contributes to giving a comprehensive understanding of the displacement amplifier, which provides guidance on designing new displacement amplifiers for improving their mechanical output performance. It is also expected to be instrumental for related researchers to understand displacement amplifiers, and to successfully select and design for specific applications.

A Review on the Flexure-Based Displacement Amplification Mechanisms

Design and modeling of a compact compliant stroke amplification mechanism with completely distributed compliance for ground-mounted actuators

Ongoing interests in high-speed precision actuation continuously sparks great attention on developing fast amplified piezoelectric actuators (APAs) with compliant mechanisms. A new type of APA with enhanced resonance frequency is herein reported based on a hybrid compliant amplifying mechanism. A two-stage displacement flexure amplifier is proposed by synthesizing the lever-type and semi bridge-type compliant mechanisms in a compact configuration, promising to a well tradeoff between the displacement amplification ratio and dynamic bandwidth. The static and dynamic performances are experimentally evaluated. The resonance frequency of 2.1 kHz, displacement amplification ratio of 6, and step response time of around 0.4 ms are realized with a compact size of 50 mm × 44 mm × 7 mm. Another contribution of this paper is to develop a comprehensive two-port dynamic stiffness model to predict the static and dynamic behaviors of the compliant amplifier. The modeling approach presented here differs from previous studies in that it enables the traditional transfer matrix method to formulate both the kinetostatics and dynamics of compliant mechanisms including serial-parallel branches and rigid bodies.

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Enhancing Dynamic Bandwidth of Amplified Piezoelectric Actuators by a Hybrid Lever and Bridge-Type Compliant Mechanism

Abstract With many micromanipulator designs emerging in micro and nanosystem applications, the element of compliance in the mechanisms is gaining attention. Several designs consider motions limited in a plane for high accuracy and repeatability as needed in micro/nano manipulation applications. Extending this to a full spatial configuration with coupled motions of series and parallel linkages with flexure joints of 1-degree-of-freedom (DOF) and 3-DOF needs a systematic analytical approach. One such approach for compliance analysis is presented in this article for a mechanism designed at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. To validate the analytical models, finite element analysis simulations are performed with the help of the Abaqus-6.14 software package. Following the successful validation, the effect of structural parameters on the performance is presented with the help of the analytical expressions. We explore the performance of the mechanism with different dimensions of flexures of a particular type. Results indicate that the design with dissimilar dimensional parameters can give superior performance. 

Compliance modeling of a full 6-DOF series–parallel flexure-based Stewart platform-like micromanipulator

https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/mechanicaldesign/article-pdf/doi/10.1115/1.4053113/6803702/md-21-1652.pdf

Qianjun Zhang

Papers

A Review on the Flexure-Based Displacement Amplification Mechanisms

Design and Analysis of a Compact Piezo-actuated Microgripper with a Large Amplification Ratio