Reliability Based Topology Optimization of Compliant Mechanisms

Electric-thermal-structural actuated compliant mechanisms are mechanisms onto which electric voltage drop is applied as input instead of force. This mechanism is based on thermal expansion of material while being heated. Compliant mechanisms are designed subjected to electric charge input using BESO(bi-directional evolutionary structural optimization) method. Reliability-based topology optimization (RBTO) is applied to the topology design of actuators. performance measure approach (PMA), which has probabilistic constraints that are formulated in terms of the reliability index, is adopted to evaluate the probabilistic constraints. In this study, BESO method is used to obtain optimal topology of compliant mechanisms from initial design domain. PMA approach is used to evaluate reliability index. The procedure has been tested in numerical applications and compared with the results obtained by other methods to validate these approaches.