Design and Characterization of a Flexure-Based Hybrid Mechanism for Precise Micro/Nano Positioning

This paper presents a hybrid mechanism for micro/nano positioning and manipulation by combining a piezoelectric actuator (PEA) and a voice coil motor (VCM) using a flexure bridge. The research investigates the behavior of the hybrid mechanism, designs the amplification mechanism, and characterizes and compares the dominant parameters through modal and finite element analysis. The models were designed using Solidworks software and optimized using response surface in ANSYS. The hybrid mechanism provides both long-range displacement and precision movement capabilities, making it suitable for micro-assembly, micro-manipulation, and microfluidics applications. The results illustrate that the amplification ratio of the flexure mechanism obtained by modal analysis was 4.38, which was 3.42% larger than that simulated by finite element model. The input stiffness of the flexure mechanism was 2231.81 N/mm, which is slightly lower than the figure calculated by Finite element analysis (FEA) at 2325.58 N/mm. However, the difference between the two output stiffnesses of this mechanism obtained by the two methods is close, standing at 1.60%.