RESEARCH CONCERNING THE POSITIONAL ANALYSIS OF A FOURTH CLASS MECHANISM

It is well known that with the increase in the class of mechanisms, the complexity of their analysis methods also increases accordingly. This is especially the case for mechanisms of class greater than four that contain kinematic groups whose structure includes deformable contours. The usefulness of these mechanisms is also given by their versatility due to the multiple configurations they can have during the kinematic work cycles. The present paper proposes a method for the positional analysis of a complex mechanism of the fourth class. First, the component independent contours of the mechanism are identified using the graph associated with it. Then, the system of equations containing the position parameters of the mechanism is established by projecting the associated vector contours on the axes of a conveniently chosen coordinate system. Solving the system of equations was done numerically, using the fsolve module included in the Maple program. The results obtained from solving the system of equations allowed the development of a functioning simulator of the analyzed mechanism. Finally, the variation curves of the position parameters on a kinematic cycle of operation are presented.