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In topology optimization of compliant mechanisms, the specific placement ofboundary conditions strongly affects the resulting material distribution andperformance of the design. At the same time, the most effective locations ofthe loads and supports are often difficult to find manually. This substantiallylimits topology optimization's effectiveness for many mechanism designproblems. We remove this limitation by developing a method which automaticallydetermines optimal positioning of a prescribed input displacement and a set ofsupports simultaneously with an optimal material layout. Using nonlinearelastic physics, we synthesize a variety of compliant mechanisms with largeoutput displacements, snap-through responses, and prescribed output paths,producing designs with significantly improved performance in every case tested.Compared to optimal designs generated using best-guess boundary conditions usedin previous studies, the mechanisms presented in this paper see performanceincreases ranging from 47%-380%. The results show that nonlinear mechanismresponses may be particularly sensitive to boundary condition locations andthat effective placements can be difficult to find without an automated method.

Compliant Mechanism Synthesis Using Nonlinear Elastic Topology Optimization with Variable Boundary Conditions