Abstract: When designing compliant mechanisms, the influ- ence of uncertain parameters on the performance of compliant mechanisms should be considered. Treating the physical parameters of compliant mechanisms and the external loads as interval variables, based on the flexible and the stiff performance metrics of compliant mechanisms, the mathe- matical model is built, which utilizes structural topological optimization in the continuum domain to design compliant mechanisms. Parameterization of material in the design domain is implemented using the solid isotropic material with penalization approach, the relative density of material is used as design variable, maximizing the linear weight summation of the mutual potential energy and the strain energy when the structure is loaded is adopted as objective function, the structure volume is used as constraint. The hybrid cellular automaton method is adopted as solving strategy for the optimal design. A global structural analysis via the interval finite element method is implemented to obtain each iteration’s information during the optimization. The local change in the design variable is determined by a local design rule based on the proportional- integral-derivative control law. The validity of the model built and its solution is illustrated by a numerical example. The prototype manufacture and its simple experiment are imple- mented, according to one of the numerical example results after the uniform magnification of scale.

Key words: Compliant mechanism, Hybrid cellular automaton, Interval finite element, Interval parameters, optimization, Structural topology, rolling bearing, high-speed train, nonlinear dynamics characteristics, pedestal looseness