Toggle Mechanisms in Switches

Performance requirement for an electrical switch is stringent. The operating mechanism mostly decides the performance. However, design of such mechanisms, which involve discontinuous motions, is not much addressed in the literature. The present work proposes a systematic procedure to design and analyze toggle based switching mechanisms. For the ab initio design of double toggle switching mechanisms, necessary structural criteria for a mechanism to exhibit double toggle phenomenon have been derived and verified. It is established that any double toggle mechanism cannot be used directly as a switching mechanism unless some necessary kinematic criteria are followed. With the help of these criteria a few switching mechanisms are constructed and their behaviours are examined through simulations. Finally, a novel double toggle switch is constructed with consideration of mass and geometric shape of the links. A systematic simulation based study has been performed to identify the influence of different kinematic and dynamic parameters on the functionality of a double toggle switching mechanism.