Topological Synthesis of Planar Metamorphic Mechanisms for Low-Voltage Circuit Breakers

Abstract

This article presents a systematic graph theory-based method for the topological synthesis of planar metamorphic mechanisms including metamorphic transformations of links and changes in the degrees-of-freedom. The parts to move, with input and output motion defined, and the topological design space, are represented by graphs of simple-jointed mechanisms. The topological requirements involving link transformations are expressed in terms of subgraphs with a given degrees-of-freedom containing prescribed input and output parts. The algorithm executes two subgraph searches inside atlases of mechanisms with different degrees-of-freedom. An application to the design of a family of low-voltage circuit-breaker mechanisms is shown.

Keywords:

• Finite-state machine
• Graph theory
• Low-voltage circuit breakers
• Metamorphic mechanisms
• Topological synthesis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work received financial support from ABB Switzerland Ltd., Corporate Research, contract 2009-447-01 (SAT UNL 537362), and from the Argentinean institutions Universidad Nacional del Litoral (CAI+ D 2009 PI65-330), Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica (ANPCyT PICT-2010-1240), and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET).

Notes

^#Communicated by M. Ceccarelli and V. Mata.