• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.1509-1517
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• 1993

The purpose of this study is to develop a program for the automatic derivation of the symbolic equations necessary for the kinematic and dynamic analyses of the spatial mechanism. For this purpose, a symbolic manipulation package called MCSYMA is used. Every symbolic equation is formulated using relative joint coordinate to obtain the numerically efficient system equations. These equations are produced in FORTRAN statements and linked to a FORTRAN program for numerical analysis. Several examples are taken for comparison with the commercial package called DADS which is using Cartesian coordinate approach. Also, this symbolic formulation approach is compared with a conventional numerical approach for an example. The results show that this symbolic approach with relative joint coordinate system is most efficient in computational time among three and is recommended for the derivation of macro elements frequently used.