International audienceThis article is devoted to the analysis of the influence of the joint clearances in a mechanism of a circuit breaker, which is a forty-two degrees of freedom mechanism made of seven links, seven revolute joints, and four unilateral contacts with friction. Spatial (3D) revolute joints are modelled with both radial and axial clearances taking into account contact with flanges. Unilateral contact, Coulomb's friction and Newton impact laws are modeled within the framework of nonsmooth mechanics without resorting to some regularizations or compliance/damping at contact. The nonsmooth contact dynamics method based on an event-capturing time–stepping scheme with a second order cone complementarity solver is used to perform the numerical integration. Futhermore, the stabilization of the constraints at the position level is made thanks to the stabilized combined projected Moreau–Jean scheme. The nonsmooth modeling approach together with an event–capturing time–stepping scheme allows us to simulate, in an efficient and robust way, the contact and impacts phenomena that occur in joints with clearances. In particular, comparing with the event–detecting time–stepping schemes, the event–capturing scheme enables to perform the time–integration with large number of events (impacts, sliding/sticking transitions, changes in the direction of sliding) and possibly with finite time accumulations with a reasonable time–step length. Comparing with compliant contact models, we avoid stiff problems related with high stiffnesses at contact which generate some issues in contact stabilization and spurious oscillations during persistent contact periods. In the studied mechanisms of the circuit breakers, the numerical methods deals more than seventy contact points without any problems. Furthermore , the number of contact parameters is small : one coefficient of restitution and one coefficient of friction. Though they are sometimes difficult to measure accurately, the sensitivity of the simulation result with respect to contact parameters is low in the mechanism of the circuit breaker. It is demonstrated that this method, thanks to its robustness and efficiency allows to perform a sensitivity analysis using a Monte Carlo method. The numerical results are also validated by careful comparisons with experimental data which show a very good correlation

International audienceThis article presents an analysis of two-dimensional four-bar mechanisms with joint clearance, when one joint is actuated by collocated open-loop or state feedback controllers (proportional-derivative, state feedback linearization, passivity-based control). The study is led with numerical simulations obtained with a projected Moreau-Jean's event-capturing algorithm. The contact/impact model uses kinematic coefficients of restitution, and Coulomb's friction. The focus is put on how much the performance deteriorates when clearances are added in the joints. It is shown that collocated feedback controllers behave in a very robust way

International audienceThe aim of this paper is to understand the influence of radial and axial clearance in the revolute joints on the overall performance of a circuit breaker. A circuit breaker mechanism is made of seven links, seven revolute joints with clearance in both radial and axial direction, four unilateral contacts with friction, and it has forty-two degrees of freedom. The Moreau-Jean nonsmooth contact dynamics (NSCD) numerical method is used to perform the simulations. The numerical results are validated by careful comparisons with experimental data

The aim of this paper is to understand the influence of clearance in the kinematic joints, dimensional and geometrical tolerances associated with the parts on the performance of a circuit breaker mechanism in the trip operation. Operating mechanism and trip unit are the essential components of a miniature circuit breaker. The operating and trip mechanism are made of ten parts with revolute and cylindrical joints with clearance and five unilateral contacts with friction. This mechanism is based on quick-make and quick-break principle. The Moreau-Jean nonsmooth contact dynamics (NSCD) numerical method is used to perform the simulations. The numerical results are validated by careful comparisons with experimental data.