Optimal Design of a New Compliant XY Micro positioning Stage for Nanoindentation Tester Using Efficient Approach of Taguchi Method, Response Surface Method and NSGA-II

A new compliant XY micropositioning stage is designed for locating a material sample during nanoindentation tester. This paper aims to design and optimize the proposed stage. The working travel of proposed stage is amplified via using the four-lever amplification mechanism. To improve the performances of the stage, the geometric parameters are optimized by an integration method of Taguchi method (TM), response surface method (RSM) and nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II). Firstly, the number of experiment of four design variables were created by the TM. Subsequently, the output displacement and the first natural frequency are retrieved by finite element analysis (FEA). Then, the mathematical equations between four design variables and both responses is established by using the RSM. Eventually, based on mathematical equations, the NSGA-II is adopted to determine the optimal parameters. The results indicated that the optimized y-axis displacement was about 3.862 mm and the first natural frequency was approximately 45.983. The results of FEA validations are in a good agreement with the predicted results from the proposed approach. This result indicated that the integrated proposed approach ensures a high reliability for engineering optimization problems.