COMPACT REPRESENTATION OF TOPOLOGICAL ENTITIES USED FOR AUTOMATED ANALYSIS OF PLANAR MECHANISMS.

Fundamentals of automated procedures for analysis of mechanisms are discussed. It is shown that topological analysis is an essential element in the overall procedure. The basic steps in the topological analysis are the identification of the paths, loops and the joints on a given link using the connectivity data of a mechanism. Linked list representation of data is used to store the path and the cutset matrices. This procedure has been implemented in MAP (Mechanism Analysis Procedure). Five example problems have been solved using new MAP, old MAP and DRAM. New MAP uses data storage about 90% less in kinematic analysis and 78% less in force analysis than DRAM uses. The storage scheme is more efficient than the one using matrices, and is best fitted on microcomputers where the storage is a limiting factor.