A New Deterministic Method for Clearance Influence Analysis in Spatial Mechanisms

Abstract

This paper focuses on spatial mechanisms with clearance-affected joints. After the review of several existing methods for the evaluation of clearance effects, a new original method is provided. The new method is shown to be more flexible and complete than the previous ones in the evaluation of clearance influence. More flexible because it allows the use of a generic model for the kinematic pairs. More complete because it can be applied to both open and close chain mechanisms loaded on a generic link.