Skip to main content

Chapter 8 Kinematic Analysis of Mechanisms

This chapter is devoted to the kinematic analysis of mechanisms, with the goal of determining their kinematic behavior based on simplified models. More specifically, our kinematic analysis may include the determination of
  1. the kinematic screws \(\{\cV_{i/j}\}\) for all kinematic pairs \((i,j)\) of the mechanism,
  2. the geometric or kinematic constraint equations,
  3. the determination of input/output geometric or kinematic laws,
  4. the trajectory, velocity and acceleration of particular points of the mechanisms.
We will present three general methods:
  1. method of geometric closure,
  2. graphical method, applicable to the analysis of planar mechanism,
  3. method of kinematic closure, applicable to all mechanisms.