Determination of the complete set of shaking force and shaking moment balanced planar four-bar linkages

A mechanism is said to be force balanced if, for any arbitrary motion, it does not apply reaction forces on the base. Moreover, if it does not apply torques on the base, the mechanism is said to be moment balanced or dynamically balanced. In this paper, a new method to determine the complete set of force and moment balanced planar four-bar linkages is presented. Using complex variables to model the kinematics of the linkage, the force and moment balancing constraints are written as algebraic equations over complex variables and joint angular velocities. Using polynomial division, necessary and sufficient conditions for the balancing of planar four-bar linkages are derived.