Title: Mechanism synthesis: a comparison of adaptive and traditional approaches

Authors: Jonathan A. Feldman; Ben J. Hicks; Glen Mullineux

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1TR, UK ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK

Abstract: Mechanism synthesis is a critical step in the design of mechanisms. It can be formulated as an optimisation problem and ways to solve this have been the subject of much recent research. Approaches based on adaptive computing have been proposed. A comparison of these with the traditional approaches is made by considering case study examples, based on four bar mechanisms, and comparing the results obtained by traditional means with those recently published for the adaptive approaches. The traditional approaches perform at least as well as the others and involve a simpler and more intuitive problem formulation.

Keywords: design optimisation; mechanism design; mechanism synthesis; path matching.

DOI: 10.1504/IJITM.2014.060308

International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 2014 Vol.13 No.2/3, pp.216 - 241

Received: 22 Nov 2012
Accepted: 12 Sep 2013

Published online: 10 May 2014 *

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