Reliability analysis of spherical function generating mechanisms

抄録

Spherical mechanisms are widely used in engineering applications. Minimizing their motion error is critical for high performance of such mechanisms. The motion error is significantly affected by uncertainties in spherical mechanisms. The impact of the uncertainties on the motion error, however, is rarely considered in mechanism analysis and synthesis. In this work, we quantify the effects of randomness in the major mechanism dimension variables on the motion error through kinematic reliability with a probabilistic approach. Two types of reliability, the point kinematic reliability and the interval kinematic reliability, are discussed. For the former the First Order Second Moment (FOSM) method is employed while for the latter a multiple-extreme-value method is proposed to maintain high accuracy. The Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) is performed as a benchmark for the accuracy comparison. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with two examples.