INCREMENTAL KINEMATIC ANALYSIS OF MECHANISMS

Kinematic design is an important aspect of the design of mechanical sy stems with moving parts. The performance of such systems may stiffer f rom the presence of parts that bind during their motion causing jams, or that execute undesired motions. Kinematic analysis needs to be cond ucted and the design of the system modified Analysis-redesign-reanalys is cycles are common in reaching a satisfactory design. If the system is large and the incidence of redesign frequent, then it becomes imper ative to have fast analysis methods. This work addresses this problem by providing computational techniques for doing incremental kinematic analysis. The mechanism is represented as a graph of objects with conn ection constraints among them. A recursive procedure traverses the gra ph to establish instantaneous kinematic properties. A store-and-reuse strategy is employed to increase the efficiency of re-analysis runs. T his involves storing intermediate results of computations for reuse in case of incremental redesign or iterative analysis. The store-and reu se strategy is also applicable when retrieving elements of previous de signs, and their associated kinematic analyses, and adapting them to n ew design problems. A comparative, quantitative study of the normal, ' 'from-scratch'' method and the incremental method is provided to prove the greater efficiency of the latter.