Design of a new 5-DOF flexure-based nanopositioning stage

In this paper, the design of a new compliant five-axis parallel nanopositioning stage driven by PZT actuators is presented, which is based on flexure mechanism. The flexure stage contains two kinds of displacement amplifiers based on simple lever principle and bridge principle, respectively. The lever structure is designed to meet the requirement of the change of direction of the output displacement. The double-bridge amplifier can achieve the large displacement by overcoming the stroke limitation of the actuator. Each pair of actuators realizes the translational displacement in one axis and the rotation in one plane. The flexure stage with three pairs of actuators can obtain 5-DOF motion as the rotation in XY-plane is redundant. FEA simulation is conducted to verify the dimension of the designed stage. Results demonstrate the performance of the designed multi-axis nanopositioning stage.