Selective Precision Synthesis of the Four-Bar Motion Generator With Prescribed Input Timing

Abstract

The recently developed Selective Precision Synthesis technique has been extended to the four-bar motion generating mechanism with prescribed input timing. A designer using this method can determine several mechanisms whose coupler triangle positions and orientations will be coordinated with the input crank rotations. The unique feature in the Selective Precision Synthesis formulation is that the path, orientations and rotations are specified along with allowable limits of accuracy creating an error envelope for each of these parameters. This modification removes the limiting conditions imposed by the precision point approach so that standard nonlinear programming techniques can be used to determine several mechanism solutions. It was found that the method yields fundamentally stable solutions rarely encountered in closed-form methods of mechanism synthesis. The problem of dyadic construction error in the original SPS technique is eliminated and the method developed here is well suited to batch or interactive computer-aided design. The computer program of this method is being made available to interested readers.