BALANCING CONDITIONS OF PLANAR MECHANISMS WITH MULTI-DEGREE OF FREEDOM

One of the problems of the complete shaking force and shaking moment balancing of planar mechanism consist of the deriving the so-called balancing conditions. These balancing conditions will be used to determine the size and location of counterweights or supplementary links which must be added to the initial mechanism, in order to eliminate the shaking force and the shaking moment caused by all moving links. The balancing methods for planar mechanisms with one degree-of-freedom can be found in a large number of publications [2-7] . However , the development on the balancing theory of planar mechanisms with multi-degree of freedom is still limited and the literature on this respect therefore is very little. In the paper, we presents a new method for deriving the general balancing conditions of planar mechanisms with multi-degree of freedom and an arbitrary structure. The developed algorithm is suitable for the application of the widely accessible computer algebra systems such as MAPLE. In the following example, the conditions for complete shaking force and shaking moment balancing of a planar five-bar linkage are given .