Modeling A Cable and Pulleys?

[Anonymous]

I'm designing a cable-operated throttle.  Rather than using simple circular pulleys, they need to be essentially cams, to provide a non-linear response.  Life would be soooooo much easier if there were some way of creating a movable model of two pulleys and the cable, and have the ability to measure how the output motions changes in response to input motion.

Is this even possible?  I can see how to get at least part-way there by replacing the cable with a simple arm that is constrained to be tangent to the two pulleys, but I'm hoping there is a much better way to do it.  In an ideal world, i'd even like to be able to model even more complex systems, with 3-4 pulleys and a single cable passing over all of them, but I'd settle for just 2.

Regards,

Ray L.

[JDMather]

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@Anonymous wrote:

 Life would be soooooo much easier if there were some way of creating a movable model of two pulleys and the cable, and have the ability to measure how the output motions changes in response to input motion. 

 ... but I'm hoping there is a much better way to do it. 

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Autodesk Inventor Professional > in the Dynamic Simulation Environment.

Students can download Inventor for free from http://www.autodesk.com/edcommunity

[Anonymous]

Not a student, so not sure that helps...

Regards,

Ray L.

[lichtzeichenanlage]

IMHO this is not possible in Fusion 360.

[etfrench]

Are both pulleys cams?  Are their centerpoints fixed?

One way of showing the end point of the cable would be to use sketches.

Project the pulleys at their begin points to a sketch.  Draw a tangent line between them.

Repeat the above while moving the pulleys through their entire range.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, I've done that, but it's pretty cumbersome.  The design will be, of necessity, iterative so I was hoping for a model that would make the iteration a lot faster and easier, and let me visualize the response.  Looks like that is not going to happen.

Regards,

Ray L.