Mechanical and control-oriented design of a monolithic piezoelectric microgripper using a new topological optimisation method.

Mathieu Grossard (1) , Christine Rotinat-Libersa (2) , Nicolas Chaillet (1) , Mehdi Boukallel (2)

1 FEMTO-ST - Franche-Comté Électronique Mécanique, Thermique et Optique - Sciences et Technologies (UMR 6174)
2 LIST (CEA) - Laboratoire d'Intégration des Systèmes et des Technologies

This paper presents a new method developed for the optimal design of piezoactive compliant micromechanisms. It is based on a flexible building block method, called FlexIn, which uses an evolutionary approach, to optimize a truss-like planar structure made of passive and active building blocks, made of piezoelectric material. An electromechanical approach, based on a mixed finite element formulation, is used to establish the model of the active piezoelectric blocks. From the first design step, in addition to conventional mechanical criteria, innovative control-based metrics can be considered in the optimization procedure to fit the open-loop frequency response of the synthetized mechanisms. In particular, these criteria have been drawn here to optimize modal controllability and observability of the system, which is particularly interesting when considering control of flexible structures. Then, a planar monolithic compliant micro-actuator has been synthetized using FlexIn and prototyped. Finally, simulations and experimental tests of the FlexIn optimally synthetized device demonstrate the interests of the proposed optimization method for the design of micro-actuators, microrobots, and more generally for adaptronic structures.

Mots clés: vibrations control; Actuator design; balanced gramian; compliant mechanisms; controllability; microgripper; microrobotics; observability; piezoelectricity; topology optimization; vibrations control.

Domaines: Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique

Mathieu Grossard, Christine Rotinat-Libersa, Nicolas Chaillet, Mehdi Boukallel. Mechanical and control-oriented design of a monolithic piezoelectric microgripper using a new topological optimisation method.. IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 2009, 14 (1), pp.32-45. ⟨10.1109/TMECH.2008.2003437⟩. ⟨hal-00417886⟩