Multicriteria optimal selection of a hydraulic cylinder for drive mechanisms

Abstract

The paper reports the optimization synthesis of a hydraulically actuated drive mechanism. A mathematical model of the mechanism using vector closure equations is developed. Based on the functional purpose of the mechanism, a set of geometric and force/moment requirements are defined which must be met by a proper selection of a standardized hydraulic cylinder and its points of attachment. A multiobjective design optimization task is defined with three objective functions whose minimum is searched - the mass of the hydraulic cylinder, the squared total deviation of the developed by the hydraulic cylinder moments from the predefined values of the external moments and the force in the hydraulic cylinder. The defined multiobjective optimization task is considered as a mixed variable nonlinear constrained optimization problem containing 5 continuous and 2 discrete variables and the multistage Monte Carlo method is used for its solution. Using different weighting schemes several Pareto-optimal compromise solutions are obtained.

Keywords

• optimization
• drive mechanism
• continuous and discrete variables
• monte carlo method