An Optimal Design Method for Compliant Mechanisms

Compliant mechanisms are crucial parts in precise engineering but modeling techniques are restricted by a high complexity of their mechanical behaviors. Therefore, this paper devotes an optimal design method for compliant mechanisms. The integration method is a hybridization of statistics, finite element method, artificial intelligence, and metaheuristics. In order to demonstrate the superiority of the method, one degree of freedom is considered as a study object. Firstly, numerical datasets are achieved by the finite element method. Subsequently, the main design parameters of the mechanism are identified via analysis of variance. Desirability of both displacement and frequency of the mechanism is determined, and then, they are embedded inside a fuzzy logic system to combine into a single fitness function. Then, the relationship between the fine design variables and the fitness function is modeled using the adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system. Next, the single fitness function is maximized via moth-flame optimization algorithm. The optimal results determined that the frequency is 79.517 Hz and displacement is 1.897 mm. In terms of determining the global optimum solution, the current method is compared with the Taguchi, desirability, and Taguchi-integrated fuzzy methods. The results showed that the current method is better than those methods. Additionally, the devoted method outperforms the other metaheuristic algorithms such as TLBO, Jaya, PSOGSA, SCA, ALO, and LAPO in terms of faster convergence. The result of this study will be considered to apply for multiple-degrees-of-freedom compliant mechanisms in future work.