A Novel W-Shaped Flexure-Guided Mechanism for High-Frequency Piezo-Actuated Micromanipulations

Recently, flexure-guided mechanisms (FGMs) have been increasingly utilized as connectors in high-frequency piezo-actuated micromanipulation systems to suppress off-axis motions. However, out-of-plane motions have been considered less for the design of FGMs, and few efforts have been devoted to the analytical modeling of off-axis motions. This article proposes a novel W-shaped flexure-guided mechanism (WSFGM) with wide bandwidth and compact structure, suppressing both in-plane and out-of-plane off-axis motions. First, the conceptual design of the WSFGM is conducted based on the isosceles triangle theorem. Second, the kinetostatic and dynamic analytical models of off-axis motions of the WSFGM are established based on the modified pseudorigid-body model since its boundary conditions cannot be solved by the traditional counterpart, in which the pseudorigid-body parameters are estimated with the deep neural network to compensate for modeling deviations. After parametric optimization, finite element simulations and experiments are conducted for validation. Results show that the volume of the proposed WSFGM is 5380.2 mm<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{3}$</tex-math></inline-formula>; the axial resonant frequency is tested as 5.951 kHz with a deviation of 5.685%; off-axis resonant frequencies are simulated as all higher than 31 kHz; and average amplitudes of off-axis motions are tested as 12.609 and 10.692 nm under sine signals of 18 kHz.