Curvature- and displacement-based finite element analyses of flexible slider crank mechanisms

The paper presents the applications of the curvature- and displacement-based finite element methods to flexible slider crank mechanisms. 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 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 by applying the displacement-based method, based on the comparison of the same number of degrees of freedom. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.