A nine-bar linkage for mechanical forming presses

Mechanical presses are machine tools capable of imposing tensile and/or com pressive stresses on the workpiece in the amount, location, and direction, and for the period of time needed, to accomplish the specified operation. T his paper proposes a nine-bar linkage applied to mechanical forming presses , composed of a five-bar linkage, a slider-crank four-bar linkage and a con necting link. The motion of the nine-bar linkage has been studied by kinema tic analysis first. Then a design procedure for the nine-bar linkage is dev eloped. Combining the linkage synthesis and the trial and error method in o rder to optimize the dimensions of this nine-bar linkage for the ram cycle and the space requirements. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reser ved.