A New Technique for Clearance Influence Analysis in Planar Mechanisms

In this paper a new deterministic method for evaluating the influence of kinematic pair clearance on planar mechanism configuration is presented. The method works in two steps: first, the position error of the link of interest in a given mechanism configuration is defined as a three component function, then the maximum value of each component is determined. The innovative aspect is that no external load is needed, whereas its knowledge is usually required by other methods in this kind of analysis. Consequently, a more general approach to the problem is allowed. The numerical efficiency of the method is finally shown by the application to an ordinary quick-return mechanism.