Tutor’s guide – cam mechanisms

This is one of the SEED curriculum engineering design guides. SEED (Sharing Experience in Engineering Design) is an organisation of teachers of design in tertiary education.

This guide aims to: determine the optimal dimensions of a cam mechanism to produce a given motion and satisfy the kinematic constraints imposed by limiting pressure angle and profile curvature as well as the artificial limitations associated with a particular application, such as space restrictions; determine the spring force needed for force closure; use cam design to illustrate the principles of preparing and applying design data for solving multi-variable problems which do not yield readily to mathematical analysis. It is recommended that the ‘Unit Design – Cam Mechanisms‘ guide be read first. See the References Section for further citations, including software. This supplement is intended to provide background information for tutors using SEED ‘Unit Design – Cam Mechanisms‘ guide for undergraduate design assignments. It includes additional explanations and figures, supplies cross-references, identifies manufacturers and outlines possible assignments. It is assumed that the students have access to micro-computers and can use a suitable spreadsheet package.

The guide includes the sections:

• The Cam Mechanism
• Cam Laws
• Forces on the Follower
• Pressure Angle
• Profile Curvature – Undercutting
• Design Procedure for Optimum Cam Size
• Validation
• The Spreadsheet
• General Approach to Cam Design
• Outlines for Assignments

[Description and screenshot taken from the SEED Curriculum for Engineering Design page for this guide. (c) The Design Society used under the terms of their (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license.]

Link: http://www.bath.ac.uk/idmrc/themes/projects/delores/co-design-website/dpg/cmt/cmthome.html
Author: G. Druce
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Rights: Copyright 2011 The Design Society - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. See http://www.bath.ac.uk/idmrc/themes/projects/delores/co-design-website/teachers/curriculum/about.html