Analytical method for locating the secondary instant centres of indeterminate planar linkages

Abstract

This article presents a new analytical method for locating secondary instant centres (SICs) of indeterminate planar linkages. In this method the SICs are first discriminated into three classes according to their level of geometric dependencies. The concepts of instant-centre digraph, instant-centre walk, and instant-centre circuit are then introduced to establish the recursive relationships between the classified instant centres. It is shown that the location of the instant centres within an instant-centre circuit can be evaluated recursively by first solving a second-order polynomial equation. In addition, by combining the recurrence conditions of several related instant-centre walks, the locations of SICs that are not within an instant-centre circuit can be solved analytically from a fourth-order polynomial equation. The proposed method does not rely on any velocity information or graphical techniques; therefore, it can be applied systematically to all types of indeterminate linkages. It can also be implemented on digital computers for automated analysis. Three numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the usage of this method.

Keywords

instant centre indeterminate linkage graph theory analytical method

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