Cam Design-A Primer - Robert L Norton

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Résumé :
I have been studying, teaching about, designing, researching, analyzing, and consulting on cam follower systems for fifty years. I designed many cams at Polaroid Corporation in the 1960-1970 period then went on to teach mechanical engineering at various universities for 42 years until 2012. I usually taught courses on kinematics, dynamics, machine design, and stress analysis. Most of these courses included the design and analysis of cams. Over the years I taught, I also actively consulted for engineering companies all around the world on machine design problems, many of them involving cams. I have written six engineering textbooks. The kinematics book, Design of Machinery, has an introductory chapter on cam design and one on cam dynamics. Cam Design and Manufacturing Handbook, written late in my career, encapsulates all the art and science on cams that I have learned from study, experimentation and original research done with my graduate students, and my 50-years of experience in cam design. When I consulted with companies about cams, it was common to find that the engineers who had designed them had little idea or expertise on how to properly design a cam. This was not because they were bad engineers...

Biographie:
Robert L. Norton earned undergraduate degrees in both mechanical engineering and industrial technology at Northeastern University and an MS in engineering design at Tufts University. He was awarded a Dr. Eng. (h.c.) by WPI in 2012. He is a registered professional engineer in Massachusetts and Florida. He has extensive industrial experience in engineering design and manufacturing and many years' experience teaching mechanical engineering, engineering design, computer science, and related subjects at Northeastern University, Tufts University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Norton has been on the faculty of Worcester Polytechnic Institute since 1981 and is currently Milton Prince Higgins II Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the mechanical engineering department. He taught undergraduate and graduate courses in mechanical engineering with an emphasis on design, kinematics, vibrations, and dynamics of machinery for 31 years at WPI before retiring from active teaching. As of this writing, he has over 55 years of professional experience in the practice of mechanical engineering. He is the author of numerous technical papers and journal articles covering kinematics, dynamics of machinery, cam design and manufacturing, computers in education, and engineering education and of the texts Design of Machinery, 6ed, Machine Design: An Integrated Approach, 6ed and the Cam Design and Manufacturing Handbook, 2ed. He is a Fellow and life member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and a past member of the Society of Automotive Engineers. In 2007, he was chosen as U.S. Professor of the Year for Massachusetts by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who jointly present the only national awards for teaching excellence given in the United States of America....

Sommaire:
they were not. I blame it on a lack of training in cam design in their engineering education. Having spent my career in the engineering ed biz, I know for a fact that most U.S. engineering curricula seldom mention cam systems to their students, let alone teach them anything useful about the subject. If cams are taught at all, they typically are included in a first course in kinematics. Many textbooks written for that course, if they have a cam chapter, it is almost always out-of-date and full of errors and misinformation. Even kinematics books written relatively recently continue to contain the same obsolete and misleading information on cam design that has been prevalent for the past 50 years. My kinematics book Design of Machinery is a notable exception...