Design Optimization and Analysis of a Damped Flexure-Guided Stage

Enforced modal damping of a piezoelectric driven positioning stage can improve its control bandwidth in avoiding of the shortcomings due to its lightly damping characteristics. This paper presents a novel damping flexure-guided mechanism with the comb-like substructures, which play a role of damping enhancement. This kind of design maintains the merits of a conventional compliant mechanism, such as fabrication methods, meanwhile, shearing damping is realized by a comb-like constrained-layer damping structure. A multi-objective optimization based on maximum control bandwidth and response smoothness is built up and implemented based on an Abaqus-Phython-Matlab cosimulation tool chain. Based on the optimal solution, a scanning transient analysis and comparison are implemented. The results indicate that the optimized flexure-guided mechanism has large modal damping and smoother frequency response than the non-optimized damping and non-damping mechanism.