Session: CIE-01-01 AMS: Advanced Modeling and Simulation (AMS General)

Paper Number: 139454

139454 - A Novel Sandwich Flexure Blade With Improved Out-of-Plane Stiffness 

High out-of-plane stiffness is crucial in flexure-based motion stages to support large payloads, suppress parasitic motions, and mitigate the adverse effects of flexible out-of-plane modes during dynamic and control performance. Low in-plane stiffness is also essential because it leads to low actuation effort and hence, low heat generation in actuators. Increasing the out-of-plane and decreasing the in-plane stiffness simultaneously in these motion stages is a challenging practice due to the inherent tradeoff between them resulting from the distributed compliance of flexure blades. This paper resolves this tradeoff by proposing a novel sandwich flexure blade that improves the out-of-plane stiffness without affecting the in-plane stiffness. Analytical models will be presented for the translational and rotational out-of-plane stiffness of single and sandwich flexure blades and their corresponding Parallelogram Flexure Modules (PFMs) based on Timoshenko beam theory. The accuracy of the analytical stiffness expressions is corroborated using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) with excellent agreement. The sandwich flexure blade and sandwich PFM exhibit higher translational and rotational out-of-plane stiffness compared to the single flexure blade and single blade PFM while the in-plane stiffness along the DoF remains nearly unchanged. Several design insights are presented based on the analytical stiffness expressions and a general procedure to design a sandwich PFM is proposed.

Presenting Author: Moeen Radgolchin University of Michigan

Presenting Author Biography: Moeen Radgolchin received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran in 2015 and 2017 respectively. He is a Ph.D. student in the Precision Systems Design Laboratory at the University of Michigan. His Ph.D. research focuses on developing novel flexure mechanisms for flexure-based XY nanopositioning motion stages, flexible systems dynamics, advanced controls, and mechatronics system design and studying zeros of flexible systems with application in flexure-based nanopositioning motion stages.

Authors:

Moeen Radgolchin University of Michigan
Siddharth Rath University of Michigan
Shorya Awtar University of Michigan