Compliant Mechanisms: Design of Flexure Hinges

Flexure hinges hold several advantages over classical rotation joints, including no friction losses, no need for lubrication, no hysteresis, compactness, capacity to be utilized in small-scale applications, ease of fabrication, virtually no assembly, and no required maintenance. Compliant Mechanisms: Design of Flexure Hinges provides practical answers to the present and future needs of efficient design, analysis, and optimization of devices that incorporate flexure hinges. With a highly original approach the text: · Discusses new and classical types of flexure hinges (single-, two- and multiple-axis) for two- and three-dimensional applications · Addresses a wide range of industrial applications, including micro- and nano-scale mechanisms · Quantifies flexibility, precision of rotation, sensitivity to parasitic loading, energy consumption, and stress limitations through closed-form compliance equations · Offers a unitary presentation of individual flexure hinges as fully-compliant members by means of closed-form compliance (spring rates) equations · Fully defines the lumped-parameter compliance, inertia and damping properties of flexure hinges · Develops a finite element approach to compliant mechanisms by giving the elemental formulation of new flexure hinge line elements · Incorporates more advanced topics dedicated to flexure hinges including large deformations, buckling, torsion, composite flexures, shape optimization and thermal effects Compliant Mechanisms: Design of Flexure Hinges provides practical answers and directions to the needs of efficiently designing, analyzing, and optimizing devices that include flexure hinges. It contains ready-to-use plots and simple equations describing several flexure types for the professional that needs quick solutions to current applications. The book also provides self-contained, easy-to-apply mathematical tools that provide sufficient guidance for real-time problem solving of further applications.