Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Stiffness Reduction Strategies For Additively Manufactured Compliant Mechanisms, Ezekiel G. Merriam

Theses and Dissertations

This work develops and examines design strategies for reducing the stiffness of 3D-printed compliant mechanisms. The three aspects of a flexure that determine its stiffness are well known: material, boundary conditions, and geometry. In a highly constrained design space however, flexure stiffness may remain unacceptably high even while arriving at the limits of design constraints. In this work, changes to geometry and boundary conditions are examined that lead to drastically reduced stiffness behavior without changing flexure thickness, width, or length. Changes to geometry can result in very complex mechanisms. However, 3D printing enables almost arbitrarily complex geometries. This dissertation presents …