7. Conclusions and Future Work - JP

In conclusion, the mechanism moved fairly smoothly throughout its full range of motion and appeared to rotate throughout its desired movement. There was some trouble stabilizing the base on a surface due to the mechanism rotating through the ground. There were also occurrences of the links hitting the base and disrupting the movement, but that only occurred if I rotated the input crank at an angle and not straight up and down. Other than that, I would consider this project to be a success, especially with the uncertainty of the joint design working.

Although the mechanism worked as intended, there are some areas I would like to improve on. For one, creating a stable ground for the base would be first because the mechanism is hard to control otherwise. Another aspect would be securing both the pin and sliding joints. The pin joints worked fine for the shorter connections but for the longer ones, the pin joint connecting the follower and coupler, there was some trouble keeping it together. The sliding joints worked fairly well too, but they can still be improved to allow a smoother movement of the mechanism. I would also want to create a smaller base that wouldn't restrict the movement of the mechanism. A motorized setup would also be considered for future work. The analysis equations weren't confirmed to be correct with the PMKS data so going over the equations and the MATLAB code would also be done.

The project was challenging but yet fun at the same time. Even though my mechanism worked, I would not consider making the mechanism completely by hand. By doing it by hand, there were some links that were narrower/wider than others, and that created small problems that were resolved but still slowed down the progression of the project. The joint connections too were not accurate and had to be done in many iterations before finding a suitable joint connection design. In my own free time, I would like to recreate this 6-bar window mechanism using actual pins, bearings, or sleeves and with plywood with consistent thicknesses to create an overall better mechanism.