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 manu- facturing technologies for prototyping and part production with polymeric mate- rials. High-complexity geometries and topology-optimized structures can be ob- tained for the fabrication of flexible single-piece parts, that do not need mechan- ical joints, particularly useful in piezoelectric applications. The fabrication of a compliant mechanism for the amplification and inversion of the displacement in- put vector has been performed in this study. A genetic algorithm has been imple- mented 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