View article

The Energy based topology optimization method has been used in the design of compliant mechanisms for many years. Although many successful examples from the energy based topology optimization method have been presented, optimized configurations of these designs are often very similar to their rigid linkage counterparts; except using compliant joints in place of rigid links. These complaint joints will endure large strain under the applied forces in order to perform the specified motions which are very undesirable in a compliant mechanism design. In this paper, a strain based topology optimization method is proposed to avoid a localized high strain of the compliant mechanism design, which is one of the drawbacks using strain energy formulation. Therefore, instead of minimizing the strain energy for structural rigidity, a global effective strain function is minimized. This is done in order to distribute the …