VII. Conclusions and Future Work - JV

The quick return mechanism worked properly, the most important measure of this being that the return velocity was quicker than the forward; however, there were some important lessons learned from this. The first one is that I can see the popularity of the Whitworth quick return mechanism, the quick return mechanism I designed was very sensitive to slight variations in the positions of joints and it seemed to be imposing a large amount of force onto the guide rails whilst in most applications you would want the force to applied to the piece that you are working. For future work I would either want to do deeper analysis on this model or redesign with a Whitworth quick return mechanism. Some of the deeper analysis I would want to do would be investigating the forces produced by this mechanism, so that I could look on the forces exerted on the rails as will as the friction forces endured with the sliding motion and cylindrical pin joints. On the electronics side of this project I would like to make some changes to the Arduino code, possibly adding an LCD display to show the angular velocity of the input, adding an ultrasonic sensor and taking the derivative of the distance states to find the velocity of the sliding joint so I could correlate the real life to experimental output, and lastly creating code to speed control the motor so that I could maintain a constant speed and guarantee that the input link has no angular acceleration.