An accelerated iterative method for the dynamics of constrained multibody systems

Abstract

An accelerated iterative method is suggested for the dynamic analysis of multibody systems consisting of interconnected rigid bodies. The Lagrange multipliers associated with the kinematic constraints are iteratively computed by the monotone reduction of the constraint error vector, and the resulting equations of motion are easily time-integrated by a well established ODE technique. The velocity and acceleration constraints as well as the position constraints are made to be satisfied at the joints at each time step. Exact solution is obtained without the time demanding procedures such as selection of the independent coordinates, decomposition of the constraint Jacobian matrix, and Newton Raphson iterations. An acceleration technique is employed for the faster convergence of the iterative scheme and the convergence analysis of the proposed iterative method is presented. Numerical solutions for the verification problems are presented to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the suggested technique.