Compliant Mechanism Design Using a Strain Based Topology Optimization Method

Energy based topology optimization method has been used in the design of compliant mechanisms for many years. Although many successful examples from the energy based topology optimization have been presented, optimized configurations of these designs are often very similar to their rigid linkage counterparts except using compliant joints in place of rigid links. It is obvious that these complaint joints will endure large deformations under the applied forces in order to perform the specified motions and the large deformation will produce high stress which is very undesirable in compliant mechanism design. In this paper, a strain based topology optimization method is proposed to avoid localized high deformation design which is one of the drawbacks using strain energy formulation. Therefore, instead of minimizing the strain energy for structural rigidity, a global effective strain functional is minimized in order to distribute the deformation within the entire mechanism while maximizing the structural rigidity. Furthermore, the physical programming method is adopted to accommodate both flexibility and rigidity design objectives. Comparisons of design examples from both the strain energy based topology optimization and the strain based method are presented and discussed.