Design of a Leaf Spring Using a Genetic Algorithm

This paper describes a design method of a leaf spring using a genetic algorithm. To avoid disconnected shape, a novel genetic representation which contains travel points and their order is proposed. A two-stage search is performed to improve the convergence and compared with the single stage search. To demonstrate the proposed method, it is applied to a leaf spring for an optical disc drive (ODD) actuator. The final result of the genetic algorithm has unnecessary parts, and thus manual mending process is needed. The obtained design of the leaf spring satisfies the required specification. The proposed design method is very simple, and hence it is expected that the proposed design method can be easily applied to other applications.