Reliability Design and Wear Extent Determination of a Cam Mechanism

The application of the cam mechanism is an important field in agricultural machinery since it can realize complex mechanical movement. The wear extent and action reliability of the cam affect the performance and accuracy of the mechanism. The paper combined reliability optimal design and tribology to build a fuzzy optimization model, with minimum of the cam base circle radius and minimum of the maximum contact stress as the objective functions. Compared with conventional optimization, the cam weight was reduced by 11.7%, the stress was increased by 1.96%, and the reliability increased 0.71%. Contrast tests were designed to determine the wear extent before and after optimization. The results prove the feasibility of optimization.