Curvature- and displacement-based finite element analyses of flexible four-bar mechanisms

Abstract

The paper presents the applications of the curvature- and displacement-based finite element methods to flexible four-bar mechanisms for the consideration of small strain with large rigid body motion. The displacement-based method usually needs more elements or high-degree polynomials to obtain highly accurate solutions. The curvature-based method assumes a polynomial to approximate a curvature distribution, and the expressions are investigated to obtain the displacement and rotation distributions. During the process, the boundary conditions associated with displacement, rotation, and curvature are imposed, which leads to the great reduction of the number of degrees-of-freedom that are required. The numerical results demonstrate that the errors obtained by applying the curvature-based method are much smaller than those obtained by applying the displacement-based method, based on the comparison of the same number of degrees-of-freedom.