Compliant MEMS micro-mirror system
The goal of this project was to design a tiny MEMS mirror that can move straight up and down very quickly and precisely, for things like adaptive optics or laser beam steering. Instead of using hinges or bearings, the motion comes entirely from compliant elements, which in this case are thin flexures that bend elastically,
Compliant mechanisms are cool because you get motion, guidance, and force transmission from one monolithic structure, so there’s no friction or backlash, and they scale really well to micro sizes. In this design, I used the FACT framework (created by UCLA professor Dr. Jonathan Hopkins) to lay out a six‑wire flexure system that gives a clean piston motion, then paired it with electrostatic parallel‑plate actuators and validated the behavior (stiffness, resonance, and roughly 125 µm travel at >2.5 kHz) through analytical modeling and FEA.