Design and Research of Spherical Four-bar Bricard-like Mechanism

doi:10.3901/JME.2025.07.338

Abstract

Abstract: Deployable mechanism has good folding and unfolding performance, so it is widely used in aerospace and other fields, and the innovative design of construction unit has always been the key problem in the design of deployable mechanism. In order to solve this problem, a new type of Bricard-like mechanism (BM) composed of three spherical four-bar mechanisms is designed and studied, and its motion characteristics and network are studied. By analyzing the constraint conditions of spherical four-bar mechanism and BM, the design method and constraint conditions of spherical four-bar BM are obtained, and three kinds of BM are obtained, that is, plane-symmetric, generalized trihedral and three-fold symmetric. The motion characteristics of the three-fold symmetric BM are analyzed in detail, and two kinds of three-fold symmetric BM are designed, namely arc and straight bar. By analyzing the characteristics of the spherical scissors mechanism and the BM, the design methods of four kinds of scissors Bricard-like mechanism(SBM) are obtained and their respective motion characteristics are analyzed. In addition, a series of network units with large deployable ratio and can be folded into a bundle are designed, and the BM and SBM are selected for designing the network. Finally, the 3D printing prototype models of BM, scissors BM and network unit are designed and made to verify the correctness of the design method and the feasibility of movement.

Key words: spherical four-bar, loop-connected, Bricard, deployable mechanism, scissors mechanism

CLC Number:

TH112

SUN Xuemin, LI Ruiming, XUN Zhiyuan, YAO Yanan. Design and Research of Spherical Four-bar Bricard-like Mechanism[J]. Journal of Mechanical Engineering, 2025, 61(7): 338-348.

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