Optimal synthesis of mechanisms is a successful approach for mechanism design to satisfy all the desired
characteristics of the designed mechanism.
T
he 4
-
bar crank
-
rocker mechanism
has wide industrial applications
and its
synthesis is of increasing importance
.
The optimal design problem in this case is a constrained multi
-
dimensional problem. Powell optimization
technique is used to minimize a special
objective function combining the mechanism stroke and time ratio.
3
functional
constraint functions are used
to
perform a successful optimization process leading to satisfying the requirements of a
successful operation of the mechanism
.
The
mechanism kine
matical functions are derived in a dimensionless form
.
The results are tabulated for
an
easy
reference to them without any calculations.
Power law models are fitted to the optimization results. It was possible to
obtain a mechanism stroke between 20 and 55
degrees and a time ratio between 1.05 and 1.204 for a transmis
sion angle in
the range 45 to 135 degrees.
A comparison is conducted between the optimal design
results using the tabulated normalized dimensions
and the
optimal
values using the proposed power
law models.