Study of Curved Beam Based Displacement Amplifying Compliant Mechanism for Accelerometer Design

The performance of an inertial micro-device largely depends on its displacement sensitivity. Different techniques like mechanical amplification using compliant mechanisms, geometric anti-spring design, and mode-localized can be employed for improving it. In this paper, a compliant mechanism-based accelerometer is studied and the design is optimized by incorporating a curved shaped beam. A detailed analysis presents interesting insight about the operation of the curved-shaped displacement amplifying compliant mechanism (DaCM). Study suggest that a larger sense mass displacement could also be achieved by DaCM with smaller geometrical amplification. The design simulations are carried out in finite element analysis (FEA) based CoventorWare and COMSOL Multiphysics simulator.