Abstract: Joint clearances are unavoidable in real mechanical systems, and they will become larger
because of the friction and wear, leading to the kinemics and dynamics of the system become worse
gradually. Based on the 3D modeling software SolidWorks and the virtual simulation software
ADAMS, a planar mechanism with joint clearance is built, and dynamic simulations are done. Further
more, the friction and wear of the joint are taken into consideration, the wear depth is calculated by
the Matlab offline using the data obtained from ADAMS, the time-varying joint clearances are then
obtained. In return, the updated joint clearances are imported into the ADAMS model, thus the
changes of the moving accuracy of the mechanism are observed. The results show that, the wearing
regions of the clearance joint are nonuniformly distributed, the moving accuracy and dynamic
performance of the mechanism are gradually worse with the time.

Key words: virtual simulation, joint clearance, wear, accuracy analysis