A method for analyzing the revolute joint wear of planar multibody systems and its application in unbalance loading working condition

This paper develops an efficient method to describe the evolution of the revolute joint wear during the process of the mechanism movement. In the framework of multibody systems formulation, the prediction method of the revolute joint wear in different motion time interval is established by considering the wear ranges between the pin and the bushing on the basis of the Archard’s wear model. Then a typical non-planar mechanism with unbalancing loads acting on single non-ideal revolute joint is used to illustrate the application of the method. Moreover, the corresponding experimental mechanism is tested to validate the predicting results of the proposed method. The analysis shows that the method proposed is of high efficiency and can guarantee enough predicting accuracy when the predicted wear depth is not big. Therefore, the method is practical to a certain degree in engineering.