A flexure-based 3-DOF parallel mechanism for optical fiber assembly

In order to bring down the cost of fiber assembly, passive method is prior to be adopted in compensation of offsets caused by positioning errors and dimensional tolerances. According to this method, this paper presents a three degree-of-freedom (DOF) planar compliant mechanism based on RCC (Remote Center of Compliance) concept. The structure of the mechanism is composed of two parts each consist of three parallel legs re-spectively, and these two components are arranged in series. In the case of passive application, compliance is mainly concerned. Therefore, theoretical calculation is imperative. This paper mainly uses pseudo-rigid-body-model (PRBM) methodology to calculate the stiffness of the mechanism. To verify the effectiveness of the theoretical model, finite element simulation is conducted. For sake of stability of the mechanism, natural frequency analysis is performed by using finite element software ANSYS.