In this chapter, an effort is made to verify if any improvement in the solution is possible by employing advanced optimization techniques to some of the mechanical element design optimization problems available in the research literature. Seven different mechanical element design problems, like optimization of a gear train, radial ball bearing, Belleville spring, multi-plate disc clutch brake, robot gripper, hydrostatic thrust bearing and four stage gear train, are considered in this chapter for the analysis. The considered problems were solved by using either GA or PSO or by both the methods by the other researchers. These problems are tested by using other advanced optimization techniques such as ABC, DE, BBO and AIA in this book. PSO is applied to the problems to which only GA was applied. The descriptions of different mechanical elements considered in this work are given in the next section.
Description of Different Mechanical DesignOptimization Problems
Example 1: Optimization of a Gear TrainThis problem is taken from Yokota et al.