  High-tech equipment critically relies on flexures for precise manipulation
and measurement. Through elastic deformation, flexures offer extreme position
repeatability within a limited range of motion in their degrees of freedom,
while constraining motion in the degrees of constraint. Topology optimization
proves a prospective tool for the design of short-stroke flexures, providing
maximum design freedom and allowing for application-specific requirements.
State-of-the-art topology optimization formulations for flexure synthesis are
subject to challenges like ease of use, versatility, implementation complexity,
and computational cost, leaving a generally accepted formulation absent. This
study proposes a novel topology optimization formulation for the synthesis of
short-stroke flexures uniquely based on strain energy measures under prescribed
displacement scenarios. The resulting self-adjoint optimization problem
resembles great similarity to classic compliance minimization and inherits
similar implementation simplicity, computational efficiency, and convergence
properties. Numerical examples demonstrate the versatility in flexure types and
the extendability of additional design requirements. The provided source code
encourages the formulation to be explored and applied in academia and industry.
