Ultimate and Practical Limits for Counterweight Balancing of Six-Bar Linkages
The designer’s main challenge when counterweight balancing a linkage is to determine the counterweights that realize an optimal trade-off between the dynamic forces of interest. This problem is often formulated as an optimization problem that is generally nonlinear and therefore suffers from local optima. It has been shown earlier, however, that, through a proper parametrization of the counterweights, a convex program can be obtained. Convex programs are nonlinear optimization problems of which the global optimum is guaranteed to be found with great efficiency. The present paper extends this previous work in two respects: (i) the methodology is generalized from four-bar to planar N-bar (rigid) linkages and (ii) it is shown that requiring the counterweights to be realizable in practice can be cast as a convex constraint. Numerical results for a Watt six-bar linkage suggest much more balancing potential for six-bar linkages than for four-bar linkages.