A 6-DOF passive vibration isolator based on Stewart structure with X-shaped legs

By employing the nonlinear stiffness and damping characteristics of a bio-inspired X-shaped structure (XSS) with passive springs and the Stewart platform with six degrees of freedom, a passive 6-DOF vibration isolation platform is designed and experimentally studied for its vibration isolation performance. A three-layer asymmetrical XSS is adopted as legs to construct a passive Stewart platform. Because of the specially designed XSS, the stiffness and damping properties of the system can be adjusted by changing structural parameters and thus it is designable to achieve an excellent performance including excellent stability and high-static-low-dynamic-stiffness isolation effect in all six directions with satisfactory loading capacity in the vertical direction, without any active control. Analytical and extensive experimental analysis of static stiffness and vibration response of the system revealed that (a) the aXSS Stewart platform has very beneficial high static nonlinear stiffness which can provide sufficient loading capacity; (b) the platform can achieve very low dynamic stiffness in each direction without losing loading capacity; (c) both static and dynamic stiffness is adjustable and designable with structure parameters and very easy to implement in a pure passive manner.