Design of compliant mechanisms for industrial applications

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Makina Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2013

Öğrenci: ALİKAN YILMAZ

Danışman: ERES SÖYLEMEZ

Özet:

Compliant mechanisms have the advantages of simplification in manufacturing and assembly, reducing cost, weight, wear, backlash and noise owing to their intrinsic structures. The aim of this study is to develop optimization methods to design reliable, high performance and easily manufacturable compliant equivalents of rigid body mechanisms used in industrial applications by utilizing the advantages of compliant mechanisms over rigid body mechanisms. Two particular mechanisms from the industry, namely a bistable field of view switch mechanism of optical systems and an adaptive finger mechanism for robot grippers are discussed in this thesis. The pseudo-rigid-body model is used for the design of bistable field of switch mechanism that is partially compliant while an analytical large deflection beam model is utilized to design the adaptive finger mechanism that is fully compliant. The optimized solutions satisfying the required motion conditions and desired force characteristics are also investigated through finite element analysis. The results are compared and the proposed designs are validated through physical prototypes.