A STUDY OF INTERFERENCE AMONG PARTS OF A MACHINE IN MOTION (TOPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF INTERFERENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF STRUCTURE WITH CLOSED-LOOP IN CLOSED MOTION)

In a previous paper, for a variety of structures extracted from a mach ine, a hierarchical representation scheme was introduced, in which s-s tructures (s=1, 2,...,5) were identified as the machine structures ess ential to analyzing the phenomena of interference among parts of a mac hine in motion. In this paper, the properties of the structures are ma thematically treated in terms of interference. By using a topological link of closed curves, a theorem is proved which states a sufficient c ondition for the following proposition: A given 3- or 4-structure with closed loops of members is Sigma(3)-interferential with regard to a c losed motion. This proposition means that the 3- or 4-structure causes every machine derived from it to produce interference during the moti on ; hence the theorem enables one to filter out unsuitable design pla ns of 3- or 4-structures from the point of view of interference avoida nce.