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

Abstract

SUMMARYThe 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 highdegree 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.

Geometric modeling of subcellular structures, organelles, and multiprotein complexes

“…Curvature has been used to analyze the stereospecificity of molecular surfaces . Curvature has also been applied for finite element analysis crank mechanisms . The essential idea is that geometries of binding partners are locally complementary to each other at the binding site(s).…”