Identification of functional components in mechanical assemblies

Manufactured products with different purposes often include similar mechanisms to realize movements required to satisfy specific functionalities. An automatic identification of common mechanisms in assembly models would be a valuable support for analysing or reusing exiting solutions during the design process. In this paper, we present a first step towards the identification of mechanism for motion transformation, focusing on those containing non-linear bearings. In particular, we describe methods for non-linear bearing identification within assemblies, which allow axial rotation, as a shaft rotation. The main novelty concerns the capability of detecting bearings independently on their design level of details, i.e. represented as assemblies of their constituent components or idealized by their external 3D shape outline. The proposed method is based on a set of rules defined according to a priori knowledge and exploits implicit information automatically extracted from the assembly description and can be extended to other types of mechanism