Positive, negative or close to zero: Tuning the stiffness of compliant ortho-planar mechanisms.

Compliant ortho-planar mechanisms can be fabricated from a single sheet of material and they can move out of the plane in which they are fabricated. In this work, a design of such a mechanism is proposed in which stiffness compensation is applied. With a finite-element model, the force-deflection relation of the buckled mechanism was modelled and it was shown that by changing the design parameters, the stiffness of the mechanism can be tuned such that it can be positive, negative or even close to zero. The mechanism was prototyped and the force-deflection relation was measured to validate the simulations.