At this moment there are more than 150 different designs of CMMA in existence. To aid the designer to develop a new or improved CMMA or choose what the design to use, a classification system is developed during the literature research. It is based on the geometrical advantage (GA) of the CMMA, and on the input and output port motion paths. Their properties resulted in 5 different classes, with a total of 50+ CMMA designs.
The mechanical efficientcy (ME) of CMMA or compliant mechanisms in general can be non- optimal because of the elastic energy storage during motion. A technique called static balancing, can be applied to improve the efficiency of the device.
A new way to apply the static balancing, without manual preloading, is developed for a straight-line micro mechanism. This technique allows applying static balancing on batch scale that was not available before. A MEMS design is developed and a prototype fabricated and tested. Another step closer in creating statically balanced for compliant mechanical micro motion amplifiers.