Unified synthesis of Watt-I six-link mechanisms using evolutionary optimization

摘要

A Watt-I mechanism can operate in eight different combinations of assembly modes and output link. In this paper, a novel approach is presented for carrying out unified optimum synthesis of various combination types of Watt-I mechanism, irrespective of whether identical or different ranges of variables are specified for different combination types. By carrying out unified synthesis the less suited combination types can be identified, leading to their elimination from the synthesis process. This results in a saving of the overall computational time. The presented approach can be implemented with most of the evolutionary optimization methods. In this paper, the Differential Evolution algorithm is chosen as the optimization method. Unified optimization results are presented for two problems. The proposed approach is general and can be used, with suitable modifications, to carry out unified optimum design of alternate mechanical systems which can perform a given task.