Chained beam-constraint-model (CBCM): A powerful tool for modeling large and complicated deflections of flexible beams in compliant mechanisms

Modeling large deflections has been one of the most funda- mental problems in the research community of compliant mech- anisms. Although many methods are available, there still exists a need for a method that is simple, accurate, and can be applied to a vast variety of large deflection problems. Based on the beam constraint model (BCM), we propose a new method for modeling large deflections called chained BCM (CBCM), which divides a flexible beam into a few elements and models each element by BCM. It is demonstrated that CBCM is capable of modeling var- ious large and complicated deflections of flexible beams in com- pliant mechanisms. In general, CBCM obtains accurate results with no more than 6 BCM elements, thus is more efficient than most of the other discretization-based methods.