To better help the mechanical design and structural optimization of bridge-type nano-positioners, an improved model was developed to describe the displacement amplification of the bridge-type mechanism in this paper. Comparative studies and experiments indicate that the proposed method can better capture the amplification performance for such systems, which can be potentially used in the design and optimization of bridge-type nano-positioners.

Nanoscale components are used extensively in a variety of nanotechnology applications. In particular, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are used in diverse fields due their superior properties. For specific applications, their mechanical behaviour under loading needs to be investigated. Buckling of CNTs is a critical failure mode and in the present study, nonlocal continuum mechanics is employed to investigate their buckling behaviour subject to elastically restrained boundary conditions.

Buckling of nonuniform carbon nanotubes are studied under concentrated and distributed axial loads. Solution is obtained via weak formulation and Rayleigh-Ritz method for a combination of simply supported, clamped and free boundary conditions for uniformly and triangularly distributed axial loads. Buckling load under tip load is more sensitive to the change in the cross-section. However buckling load is more sensitive to the magnitude of the tip load for the clamped-free boundary conditions.

This paper presents the output decoupling property of flexure-based mechanisms. The model shows that mechanisms are output decoupled when they are symmetry about two perpendicular axes or when they are composed of either three or an even number of identical limbs distributed evenly around the center. The results obtained from the proposed model and FEA are almost same, which validates the model. It provides a reference point for further studies on the design and optimization of mechanisms.