Developing and modeling a plane 3 DOF compliant micromanipulator by means of a dedicated MBS code

In the present investigation, a new Multi-Body System code has been introduced for studying the static and dynamic analysis of micro-compliant mechanisms. Since the first natural frequency of elastic microsystems can be expected to be quite high, the integration time was significantly reduced and the step time interval was also reduced during integration. The code applies the Lagrange Multiplier method of dynamic analysis to the pseudo-rigid body model of the compliant microsystem, the latter being obtained by imposing the centers of the revolute joints of the model be coincident with the centers of the elastic weights of the flexural arcs of the real system. The actual construction of one-to-one scaled prototypes have been also described as a first step to a possible future comparison of the code results and the MEMS real behaviour. For this reason, two adopted construction techniques have been described: copper electro deposition and RIE on silicon.