General Purpose Software to Solve the Inverse Dynamics and Compute the Internal Efforts of Non-redundant Planar Mechanisms

Abstract

GIM is a general purpose kinematics simulation program which was initially developed to compute and visualize the motion of mechanisms of any number of DOFs. In this motion simulation, at each mechanism position, the velocities and accelerations results are obtained and stored. This paper presents a new computation module recently added to the GIM program which is able to read those kinematic results in order to build the inertial efforts and simulate the inverse dynamics of the mechanism. All joint efforts are computed across the motion, so the free solid diagram of any link can be depicted at a specific position, as well as animated over time. In addition, for straight axis elements of the mechanism, the inertial forces are considered as distributed loads, and the internal efforts diagrams (axial and shear forces and bending moment) are traced. These results allow a further cross section dimensional design for such elements.