Guiding Principles

Crossed Roller Bearings

Crossed Roller Bearings

In crossed roller bearings the point contact of the balls is replaced by the line contact of the rollers. They are therefore stiffer and can be operated with reduced preload resulting in reduced friction. Smoother travel and higher load capacity can be achieved, too.

Flexures

Zero-Runout Flexure Guiding System. Not lateral runout

A flexure is a frictionless, stictionless device that relies upon the elastic deformation (flexing) of a solid material. The flexure design is ideal for actuators where the required displacement is on the order of 10 % or less of actuator's outer Dimensionss. Sliding and rolling are entirely eliminated from the design. In addition to absence of internal friction, flexure devices exhibit high stiffness, load capacity, and resistance to shock and vibration.

PI provides piezo driven flexure stages with sub-nanometer resolution, sub-nanometer flatness and straightness and sub-µrad pitch, yaw and roll (see "PZT Flexure NanoPositioners" section).