Design Optimization of Planar Mechanisms

This paper presents an optimization technique to dynamically balance the planar five-bar mechanisms in which the shaking force and shaking moment are minimized using the genetic algorithm (GA). A dynamically equivalent system of point-masses that represents each rigid link of a mechanism is developed to represent link's inertial properties. The shaking force and shaking moment are then expressed in terms of the point-mass parameters which are taken as the design variables. These design variables are brought into the optimization scheme to reduce the shaking force and shaking moment. This formulates the objective function which optimizes the mass distribution of each link. The balancing problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem and multiple optimal solutions are created as a Pareto front by using the genetic algorithm. The masses and inertias of the optimized links are computed from the optimized design variables. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is shown by applying it to a problem of five-bar planar mechanism available in the literature.