Functional synthesis of mechanisms under cost consideration

Functional synthesis of mechanisms plays a crucial role in mechanical product design, which has an essential effect on the product innovation and cost. However, current functional synthesis algorithms of mechanisms are either inextensible to achieve complex mechanism solutions or prone to a loss of optimal solutions without consideration of cost. This article proposed a systematic kinematic state-based methodology for functional synthesis of mechanisms under cost consideration. After a general functional representation model based on the kinematic state pair is proposed with a result of the kinematic state space, an exhaustive functional synthesis of the kinematic state pair with the lowest cost algorithm is then proposed to produce solutions with K-lowest cost. The functional synthesis of a feeding mechanism device for cold heading machine is given as an example, which demonstrates that the methodology is obviously helpful to produce valuable functional chain solutions with low cost.