Design And Research On Micro-force Magnifying Mechanism Of 3-D Ocean Current Sensor

With the deepening of the ocean environment investigation and the ocean resource exploitation, the higher technical requirements of the ocean observation instruments were proposed. Ocean current is one of the important elements of ocean environments, which not only has large horizontal flow rate, but also has small vertical flow rate. The existing ocean current measuring instruments can’t measure this ocean current that has a big difference between the horizontal and vertical flow rate. To solve this difficulty, the research group designed a three-dimensional ocean current sensor which can measure this ocean current with a large difference in the flow rate of the horizontal and vertical plane. Micro-force magnifying mechanism that was designed by this paper is an important part of the sensor to achieve the vertical ocean current flow rate measurement.Firstly, this paper introduced the measuring principle of the three-dimensional ocean current sensor and designed the overall structure of the ocean current sensor. The overall structure of the ocean current sensor was mainly composed of two parts:a horizontal flow rate measuring device with ball shell and cross beam and a vertical flow rate measuring device with multi-stage leveraged compliant micro-force magnifying mechanism. Then the flexible hinge as the key components of force amplification mechanism was analyzed. Three typical flexible hinges were selected to restructure, and the mechanical model of the restructuring model is established. Stiffness of multiple flexible hinges was compared, and circular flexible hinge which has a greater stiffness was selected as the flexible member of the micro-force magnifying mechanism. Followed, on the basis of design features and working principle of micro-force magnifying mechanism, the form of the structure of the mechanism was determined, and mechanical model of the mechanism was established. Finally, structural parameters of the micro-force magnifying mechanism were optimized through this method which combines the single factor analysis and orthogonal test, and optimal dimensions of structure parameters of the micro-force magnifying mechanism were obtained. The results showed that:force magnification of the final micro-force magnifying mechanism was 609.22, and the final mechanism was able to achieve micro-force amplification and conform to requirements of tiny lift amplification and measurement of the three-dimensional ocean current sensor.