Fig. 1
From: Additively manufacturable micro-mechanical logic gates
Design of bi-stable flexure mechanisms. a Undeformed shape of a bi-stable flexure mechanism with a smallest feature size t = L/30, where L is the length of a bi-stable flexure. b Two buckled shapes of the bi-stable flexure mechanism that are generated using COMSOL Multiphysics® where high-stress regions are indicated by bright colors. c Total deformation energy Ep as a function of the position ds and compression distance h for the bi-stable flexure mechanism in b. d Undeformed shape, first, and second buckling mode shapes and their corresponding critical compression distance h1 and h2 of two different bi-stable flexure mechanism designs. Design A was chosen for this study due to the large distance between 1st and 2nd buckling modes which means the logic gate is more tolerant to errors in the fixturing during precompression
