Unified mechanism synthesis method of a planar four-bar linkage for path generation employing a spring-connected arbitrarily sized rectangular block model

Abstract

In the present study, a unified mechanism synthesis method that carries out type and dimensional syntheses simultaneously is proposed to solve path generation synthesis of a planar four-bar linkage. A spring-connected arbitrarily sized rectangular block model is introduced and an optimization problem using the block model is formulated. Several path generation synthesis problems are successfully solved with the proposed method. It is verified that the proposed method is computationally more efficient than the previous method employing a constant size block model. Furthermore, the proposed method is shown to solve some path synthesis problems that could not be solved by the previous method. Finally, an index to define the level of difficulty of a path generation synthesis problem is proposed, and the index limit value of path generation problems that can be solved by the proposed method is obtained.