An optimum design of variable input speed for the Geneva mechanism is aimed at improving the kinematic performance of the traditional Geneva mechanism by eliminating infinite angular jerks and reducing the peak angular acceleration of the Geneva wheel during the indexing motion. The normalized angular velocity and acceleration of the Geneva wheel corresponding to the normalized time are introduced. A polynomial function of the normalized time is used to describe the normalized angular position of the crank, and therefore, the corresponding polynomial coefficients are considered as the design variables. The optimum design task is very specialized and difficult to solve with some evolutionary and swarm optimization methods because of the extremely large range for the value of the design variable, arising from the utilization of a higher order polynomial for the normalized time parameter with a value between 0 and 1. A new evolutionary algorithm termed teaching-learning-based optimization comprises a teacher phase and a learner phase. In the teacher phase, the entire population can be gradually shifted to a more promising region, which may be very far from the relatively small initial region. The obtained optimal results are compared with those obtained using the length-adjustable deriving link method discussed in the literature. The findings show that the difference in the effectiveness of the variable input speed method and the length-adjustable driving link method for the reduction of the peak angular acceleration of the Geneva wheel is small.
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