On the Development of a Compliant Mechanism for Displacement Amplification Produced by Selective Laser Sintering

Selective laser sintering is one of the most established additive manufacturing technologies for prototyping and part production with polymeric materials. High-complexity geometries and topology-optimized structures can be obtained for the fabrication of flexible single-piece parts, that do not need mechanical joints, particularly useful in piezoelectric applications. The fabrication of a compliant mechanism for the amplification and inversion of the displacement input vector has been performed in this study. A genetic algorithm has been implemented to generate the geometry, and after a re-design process, the amplification performance of the real part was compared to finite element analysis values. The complete design and realization process leads to a decrease from 50.00 to 10.25 in amplification factor, showing that too restrictive conditions in the case study definition resulted in a global increase in the structure stiffness.