A general framework for designing compliant deployable mechanisms via geometrically exact beam theory

Compliant deployable mechanisms (CDMs), as a novel and promising type of mechanisms, have been gradually used in medical industry, aerospace and other engineering fields that require high space utilization and compactness. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a general and efficient methodology to design and analyze CDMs. This paper proposes a general framework for designing and analyzing CDMs. The proposed framework has been verified by finite element method (FEM) first. Then, for practical validation, we design two types of compliant deployable mechanisms for different application scenarios within this framework, and experimental testing has been conducted to prove the feasibility of the proposed framework. Compared to the existing methods for designing CDMs, this framework demonstrates a more general scheme where different engineering scenarios can be taken into account to meet the design requirements, presenting several desired advantages over the existing methods, such as higher accuracy and less computational expense.