09.4 Kinematic Analysis
Kinematic analysis:
The above figure shows the following parameters:
The position of the tip of the second slotted linkage in x and y
The velocity of the tip versus the crank angle
The acceleration of the tip versus the crank angle
The position plot shows the motion of the coupler in the slot of our top linkage as it goes down the arm. When the motion changes from linear with a negative slope to the S shape, the slider hits the end of the slot at which point the whole mechanism shifts causing that motion in the tip and then once it reaches a steady position, it continues sliding down the slotted linkage. The profile of the linkages at the non-linear section is the ideal motion for our system because it caused the “flicking” motion of the top that we know that cats enjoy
The velocity analysis plots show that at the end of our cycles, there is a big jump in velocity as shown by the acceleration graph as well which shows quick acceleration and high velocities which, as discussed before, is ideal to keep the attention of a cat.
For our kinematic analysis and motion analysis, we asked ChatGPT to help because the linkage system that we designed was more complex than the systems that we had learned in class.
Above is an animation of the mechanism we designed. Because we had two different input variables, the crank and link 1, there are multiple different solutions to the rotations of each linkage so to simplify the animation, we locked the position of our linkage 1 to be at 45 degrees. This shows the main flicking motion that our slider crank creates and isolated the more kinematically important motion.