Development of ‘XY’ Flexural Mechanism

Abstract

The main requirement of a flexural mechanism for Nano-positioning as well as micro-positioning stage used in various nanotechnology equipment is to have minimum parasitic motion or cross axis motion and large range in the direction of force. This paper presents the design and analysis of 2-DOF flexure mechanism for a Nano-positioning stage. This paper motivated by the problem of designing Nano-positioning equipment for two dimensional (2-D) motion stages for micro-nano manipulation of objects. A flexural parallel mechanism for two translations is proposed and applied to XY fine motion stage driven by the weight with the help of pulley (alternative of the piezo electric actuator). Due to the active joint chains for motion, the mechanism has more compact structure than the other which have the separated mechanism of motion guide and the displacement amplification. The flexural mechanism is designed, considering related design constraints using finite element analysis and experimentally tested for validation of FEA results. Both the theoretical and FEA results confirm the mechanism meeting the large range requirement for Nano-micro-positioning stages.