A Compliant Micro Frequency Quadrupler Transmission Utilizing Singularity

This paper presents a method for the design of compliant micro transmission mechanisms which multiply the motion frequency of a cyclic input motion. Compliant embodiments are generated based on exploiting the singularity in a double-slider mechanism, which provides building blocks with a frequency multiplication factor of two. It is shown that the proposed building blocks can be concatenated for higher frequency multiplication ratios, and that the maximum number of blocks is limited by the desired travel range of the output. The input-output kinematics and the different stiffness characteristics of the building blocks are discussed based on pseudo-rigid-body model (PRBM). To validate the building block approach, a compliant micro transmission mechanism is presented which quadruples the frequency of a cyclic rectilinear input motion. Furthermore, a micro scale prototype was dimensioned and fabricated out of silicon using deep reactive ion etching to evaluate the design experimentally and validate the PRBM and finite element models.