FEA analysis and experimental investigation of building blocks for flexural mechanism

Planar XY Flexural Mechanisms have numerous applications in precision motion mechanisms. Flexural mechanisms generate relative motion between fixed support and motion stage using flexibility of material. This type of mechanisms offers frictionless motion, zero backlash and high order of repeatability. Flexural mechanisms consist of motion stage, flexible elements (building blocks) and fixed support. Various researchers developed flexural mechanism using various building blocks; these can be broadly categorized into hinges and planar type. Present paper investigates basic building blocks of planar flexural mechanism such as single cantilever beam, parallelogram flexure and double parallelogram flexure based on various performance parameters such as deformation, stiffness, payload capacity, parasitic error, angular rotation and cross axis coupling error etc. using FEA analysis tool ANSYS. It is observed that Double Parallelogram Flexural Manipulator (DFM) offers better performance, hence experimental setup is developed using DFM. Comparison of different building blocks of flexural mechanism shows DFM offers better performance and is further experimentally validated. Also, FEA analysis of XY Flexural mechanism which uses DFM as building block is presented.