On the shaft locations of two contra-rotating counterweights for balancing spatial mechanisms

Abstract

It has been shown in a previous work that a frequency term of the shaking force of spatial mechanisms, whose hodograph is proved to be an ellipse, can be eliminated by a pair of contrarotating counterweights. In this work, it is found that the relevant frequency term of the shaking moment is minimized if the balancing shafts are coaxial at the centre of a family of ellipsoids, called isomomental ellipsoids, with respect to (w.r.t.) any point on an ellipsoid, as is also the root mean square (r.m.s.) of the relevant frequency term of the shaking moment. It can also be minimized even though the location of either shaft, but not both, is chosen arbitrarily on a plane. The location of the second shaft is then determinate. In order to locate the centre, a derivation for the theory of isomomental ellipsoids of a frequency term of the shaking moment of spatial mechanisms is given. It is shown that the r.m.s. of a frequency term shaking moment of a spatial mechanism w.r.t. the concentric centre of the isomomental ellipsoids is the minimum. Examples of a seven-link 7-R spatial linkage and a spatial slider-crank mechanism are included.