Design of Microstructure Parameters on a Small Multi-Throttle Aerostatic Guideway in Photolithography

A compact multi-throttle aerostatic guideway is the preferred structure for high precision and acceleration motion in the variable-slit system(VS)of photolithography.The presence of microstructure,such as recesses and grooves,on the guideway working surface has been found to improve the loading performance.Nevertheless,the effects on the guideway performance of changing the microstructure on the micron level are not yet clear.The mesh adaptation method,which was proposed by the authors,is employed in this paper to quantitatively study the influences of four microstructure parameters.The effect of tuning these parameters on the loading performance is revealed.The level of impact determines the proposed design process of the parameters.The characteristic feature of the proposed design process is that the working points of carrying capacity,stiffness,and rotational stiffness are unified under twoway adjusting by means of recess parameters.According to the proposed design process and tuning method,the restriction of supply pressure is lifted to a certain extent and the mutual tradeoff among the loading performances is relieved.The experimental results show that the rotational stiffness of the designed guideway,based on the tuned parameters,reached 2.14×10^(4) Nmrad1 and increased by 69.8%.In a scanning test of the applied VS on argon fluoride laser(ArF)photolithography,the average scanning acceleration reached 67.5 m·s^(-2),meeting the design specification.

Seismic safety assessment of existing masonry infill structures in Nepal

Reinforced concrete（RC） buildings in Nepal are constructed with RC frames and masonry infill panels. These structures exhibit a highly non-linear inelastic behavior resulting from the interaction between the panels and frames. This paper presents an extensive case study of existing RC buildings in Nepal. Non-linear analyses were performed on structural models of the buildings considered as a bare frame and with masonry infill, in order to evaluate the influence of infill walls on the failure mechanisms. Five three-storey buildings with different structural configurations and detailing were selected. The effect of masonry infill panels on structural response was delineated by comparing the bare-framed response with the infill response. Seismic performance is evaluated with regard to global strength, stiffness, energy dissipation, inter-storey drift, and total deflection of the structure. A parametric analysis of structures with masonry infill is also performed. For this, the influence of different material properties is studied, namely diagonal compressive stress, modulus of elasticity and tensile stress of masonry infill panels. Study results show that masonry infill increases the global strength and stiffness of the structures; it decreases the inter-storey drift and hence the total displacement of the structure. The results quantify the influence of the infill panels on structural response and, in particular, the effect of the diagonal compressive strength of the masonry wall.

Conceptual design,modeling and compliance characterization of a novel 2-DOF rotational pointing mechanism for fast steering mirror

In this paper,a novel 2-DOF rotational pointing mechanism(RPM)is designed inspired by the guidelines of the graphical approach.The mechanism integrates with a fast steering mirror(FSM)for compensating pointing errors of a laser beam.The design intends to achieve an angular travel of±10 mrad and steers a 25 mm mirror aperture.A planar flexure with beam flexures accompanied in parallel with an axial flexure build-up mechanism configuration.Compliant mechanismbased RPM ensures high precision and compactness.Compliance characteristics are established based on the stiffness matrix method for four different planar flexure layouts.One layout with best in-plane rotational compliance is then assessed for performance sensitivity to mechanism dimension parameters and parasitic error,thus informing the design space.Rotational stiffness in both the inplane rotational axes and stress is determined based on finite element analysis(FEA).The wire electrical discharge machining(EDM)is employed for developing the proof of concept for the RPM and is then assembled in FSM.Experiments are conducted to determine the rotational stiffness and angular travel about both in-plane rotational axes.Comparison among theoretical,numerical and experiments reveal excellent linearity of rotational stiffness along the rotational travel range.The maximum theoretical error is less than 5.5%compared with FEA while,the experimental error has a mean of 5%and 3%for both rotational axes thus satisfying the intended design requirement.