Kinetostatic Modeling of Fully Compliant Bistable Mechanisms Using Timoshenko Beam Constraint Model

Fully compliant bistable mechanisms (FCBMs) have numerous applications in both micro- and macroscale devices, but the nonlinearities associated with the deflections of the flexible members and the kinetostatic behaviors have made it difficult to design. Currently, the design of FCBMs relies heavily on nonlinear finite element modeling. In this paper, an analytical kinetostatic model is developed for FCBMs based on the beam constraint model (BCM) that captures the geometric nonlinearities of beam flexures that undergo relatively small deflections. An improved BCM (i.e., Timoshenko BCM (TBCM)) is derived based on the Timoshenko beam theory in order to include shear effects in the model. The results for three FCBM designs show that the kinetostatic model can successfully identify the bistable behaviors and make reasonable predictions for the locations of the unstable equilibrium points and the stable equilibrium positions. The inclusion of shear effects in the TBCM model significantly improves the prediction accuracy over the BCM model, as compared to the finite element analysis (FEA) results.