Abstract
In the last decades, compliant mechanisms have been extensively adopted in engineering applications and many methods and approaches have been proposed for their design. Among this variety, the rigid-body replacement method has proved to be an effective tool for both the analysis and the synthesis of the compliant systems. A fundamental step of this method consists of replacing the revolute joints of the pseudo-rigid body model with flexible elements. Generally, this substitution is based on a proper positioning of the flexible element with respect to the rotation axis of the kinematic pair. In case of cross-axis flexural pivots, the intersection point of the crossing flexures usually serves as nominal center of rotation. In this paper, besides the positioning, the orientation of the flexural pivot is considered as a fundamental parameter of the design phase. A procedure is defined to determine the optimal orientation of the flexure that guarantee the prescribed rotation of the connected links. According to the proposed method, a compliant four-bar linkage is designed and numerical simulations are performed to asses its kinetostatic behavior. Numerical simulations are also carried out to compare the performance of the designed mechanism to the performance of compliant mechanisms based on non-specific orientation of their flexible elements.