An element addition strategy for thermally actuated compliant mechanism topology optimization

Abstract

Users who downloaded this article also downloaded: (2013),"Electro-thermal compliant mechanisms design by an evolutionary topology optimization method", Engineering Computations, Vol. 30 Iss 7 pp. 961-981 http://dx.If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to describe an element addition strategy for topology optimization of thermally actuated compliant mechanisms under uniform temperature fields. Design/methodology/approach -The proposed procedure is based on the evolutionary structural optimization (ESO) method. In previous works, this group of authors has successfully applied the ESO method for compliant mechanism optimization under directly applied input loads. The present paper progresses on this work line developing an extension of this procedure, based on an additive version of the method, to approach the more complicated case of thermal actuators. Findings -The adopted method has been tested in several numerical applications and benchmark examples to illustrate and validate the approach, and designs obtained with this method are compared favorably with the analytical solutions and results derived by other authors using different optimization methods, showing the viability of this technique for uniformly heated actuators optimization. Research limitations/implications -As a simple initial approach, this research considers only uniform heating of the system, while many thermal actuators are heated nonuniformly. Future works will be based on electrothermal actuation, and nonuniform Joule heating will be considered as well, which might lead to more elegant and efficient solutions. Practical implications -Compliant micromechanisms that are responsible for movement play a crucial role in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) design, which cannot be manufactured using typical assembly processes and may not make use of traditional hinges or bearings. The topology optimization method described in this paper enables the systematic design of these devices, which can result in reduced conception time and manufacturing cost. Originality/value -The ESO method has been successfully applied to several optimum material distribution problems, but not for thermal compliant mechanisms. Even if...

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“…Numerical simulations are successfully used in computation engineering with a high predicting accuracy, especially in topology optimization of compliant mechanisms (Ansola et al , 2010; Jin and Zhang, 2016). In this study, FEA simulations are used to retrieve the performances of the TBCM.…”

Laser-Activated Lightweight Porous Linear Actuation Micro Mechanisms through Multiscale Topology Optimization with Considering Radiation

“…Yin and Ananthasuresh proposed systematic methodologies for topological optimization of electrothermally actuated compliant mechanisms, highlighting the importance of convection modeling [31]. Ansola et al investigated topology optimization strategies for thermally actuated compliant mechanisms, employing an additive element strategy [32].…”

Electro-thermal compliant mechanisms design by an evolutionary topology optimization method

“…The ESO method has been successfully applied to several structural optimization problems so far, like stiffness (Chu et al, 1996), frequency or buckling (Manickarajah et al, 1998), and extended to design dependent loads (Huang and Xie, 2011) or complex cases like optimal design of absorption structures . It has been also used for planar and 3D compliant mechanism design (Ansola et al, 2010b) and for the simple case of compliant mechanisms subjected to uniform temperature fields (Ansola et al, 2010a). This paper describes the generalization of the ESO method for electro-thermally actuated compliant mechanism design where the loads arise due to a non-uniform change in the temperature by virtue of the Joule effect when an electrical current is applied.…”

“…The ESO method has been successfully applied to several structural optimization problems so far, like stiffness (Chu et al, 1996), frequency (Xie and Steven, 1996) or buckling (Manickarajah et al, 1998), and extended to design dependent loads (Huang and Xie, 2011) or complex cases like optimal design of absorption structures . It has been also used for planar and 3D compliant mechanism design (Ansola et al, 2010b) and for the simple case of compliant mechanisms subjected to uniform temperature fields (Ansola et al, 2010a).…”