The rotational geometric influence coefficients of a planar multi-loop mechanism (Q1303251)

The authors employ screw algebra to derive relatively simple and explicit expressions for the complex motion-invariant rotational first- and second-order geometric influence coefficients for a planar multi-loop mechanism in terms of reciprocal products of screws and differential screws. The concept of differential screws is introduced and used as an effective tool in characterizing the second-order geometric influence of coefficients. The geometrical interpretation of both the screw product and the reciprocal product of screws in two-dimensional space is given to simplify the formulation. With the proper use of geometric influence coefficients, the authors are able to investigate kinematic and dynamic problems of mechanisms. In particular, the derived simple expressions for geometric influence coefficients are implemented to obtain the angular velocity-square/acceleration ratio for the output link. The authors point out that the presented formulation can be extended to cover spherical and other spatial mechanisms as well as multi-degree-of-freedom multi-loop mechanisms.