Application of Compliant Mechanisms to Active Vibration Isolation Systems

Compliant mechanisms have been designed for various types of applications to transmit desired forces and motions. In this paper, we explore an application of compliant mechanisms for active vibration isolation systems. For this type of application, an actuator and a compliant mechanism are used to cancel undesired disturbance, resulting in attenuated output amplitude. An actuator provides external energy to the system while a compliant mechanism functions as a transmission controlling the amount of displacement transmitted from the actuator to the payload to be isolated. This paper illustrates, based on preliminary results of finite element analyses (FEA), that a compliant mechanism equipped with an actuator can be used as an active vibration isolator to effectively cancel a known sinusoidal displacement disturbance at low frequencies by using a feedforward disturbance compensation control. The nonlinear FEA shows that a sinusoidal displacement disturbance of 6.0 mm amplitude is reduced by 95% at 3.9 Hz and 91% at 35.1 Hz with a sinusoidal displacement controlled input of 0.73 mm amplitude.