Are you the same elf on Homeshopmachinist? I'm reading about Flexures right now. Never heard of them before.elf wrote:Flexures
Thanks,
-JW:
Moderators: rjlittlefield, ChrisR, Chris S., Pau
Ray,ray_parkhurst wrote:These work so well because the systems are essentially springs which are highly constrained in all but the dimension intended for movement. Speaker drivers used as voice coil steppers operate similarly. The voice coil drivers sold for such purposes are not constrained, so a supporting structure is required. Speakers have these structures built-in and optimized for damping factor, so are ideal for this purpose. Most of the damping comes from the acoustics of the enclosure, but stand-alone drivers I've tested seem to be well enough damped without the enclosure to be useful for small-step stacking. I can't tell you how well an enclosure-less driver might work at high magnifications as I have not tested such a system, but up to 20-40x they seem ideal. At higher mags I do expect some sensitivity to room air movement, so there will be a limit to the step size for such a driver. Adding enclosure would greatly reduce this limit.
It's not clear to me what the ultimate limit is for step size in such a constrained system. I'd think it would be limited by the characteristics of the constraining springs. For a driver, there are two springs...the spider, and the surround. Someone much better at mechanics and materials than I might be able to tell you the limits, but I doubt there is any issue down to the nm range.
edited to add: another limit would be the noise level in the driving electronics. Not sure which wins (loses)...mechanical or electrical
Sure, with appropriate filtering the electrical factors could be eliminated. As we know the gain is fairly low in such a system, on order of 1mm/V, or perhaps 3 orders of magnitude below where noise would impact.mawyatt wrote:
Ray,
I would think with proper design the electrical noise could be made arbitrarily small since the bandwidth doesn't need to be high. A 1Hz or lower bandwidth seems reasonable for stacking, and a few nanovolt/rt(Hz) noise levels are possible. So environmental noise is probably the bigger noise source, and as you mentioned airflow is a major concern at these levels. I've even had to deal with airflow induced "noise" with ultra-precise electronics!
Best,
I created it in Fusion 360. I'll have to look at the Openflexure a little more closely.Smokedaddy wrote:Where did you find your 3D printed model?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK_o7MRmC3s
-JW:
https://github.com/rwb27/openflexure_microscopeelf wrote: I created it in Fusion 360. I'll have to look at the Openflexure a little more closely.