Mechanical Design Handbook

Solid Edge has a very useful application called " Motion " which allows a user to simulate the movement of mechanical parts. This enables machine designers to test and make sure that the movement of their mechanism is the same as they expect before manufacturing parts. This helps save a lot of money. However, instead of using the " Motion " application, I would like to show you how to simulate the motion of mechanical parts using a sketch in Solid Edge together with Microsoft Excel . Why? Most of the time, I started my mechanical design with the concept and layout using sketches. If we could simulate the motion of mechanical parts in a sketch, it would help me a lot. I got this idea when I was playing with sketches and constraints in Solid Edge . Solid Edge allows us to change the dimensions easily by just rotating the mouse wheel. Watch the following video to see how easy it is to simulate motion in a sketch. So what I have to d...

Problems in mechanical design often require the solution of nonlinear equations such as: 3x 3 - 20x 2 + 1000x + 12000 = 0 These problems are stated in the form: find the zeros or roots of the function f(x) ; that is, find the values of x that make f(x) = 0 . Therefore, they are sometimes called root solving problems . The equation shown above is typical of those encountered when finding maximum stress at a point. While such equations can be solved by trial and error (guessing values until the left-hand side is nearly zero), there exist simple, systematic ways to solve them, such as the Method of False Position and the Newton-Raphson method . Root Finding Methods The Method of False Position systematically narrows down the region in which the root exists. The Newton-Raphson method is more sophisticated, using the slope of the function (derivative) to estimate the root's location. For most functions, Newton-Raphson converges much faster and is generally the method of ...