Design of High Stiffness Inertial Slider for in-Situ TEM

This paper presents the step by step design of a high stiffness inertial slider for applications such as In-situ transmission electron microscope (TEM) where high precision positioning is required. The effect of various parameters on dynamic behavior of the inertial slider is studied. The most critical parameter controlling the dynamics of the slider system is the stiffness of the system. In the design the stiffness of all the input components are lumped together to achieve at the effective stiffness. The design of applied waveform to obtain maximum step size and higher speed of the slider are discussed. The effect of external guide force and damping of the system are also studied in this work. The other parameters which decide the design are the mass of slider, mass of piezo, friction co-efficient between the piezo electric actuator and the slider, slope during rise & drop of the waveform, etc. For a given set of these parameters a minimum stiffness requirement is proposed. Using physical principles, equations are developed to estimate the step size for given input parameters. The effect of variation in input parameters of the system are also studied using numerical experiments carried out using MATLAB.