Topological vs Global Penalty Formulations for Real-Time Flexible Multibody Dynamics

Abstract

The simulation of flexible multibody systems is a very demanding task that needs improvements in efficiency in order to achieve real-time performance. One of such improvements may be the use of topological formulations, which have provided good results in the simulation of large rigid multibody systems. In this work, a topological formulation for rigid bodies is extended to the flexible case, and tests are carried out in order to compare its performance with that of a global formulation. Two systems are simulated, a double four-bar mechanism and a vehicle suspension. As it happened in the rigid case for these two examples, the topological formulation shows lower performance than its global counterpart for such small systems, but the difference decreases as more bodies are modeled as flexible. Since in the rigid case the topological formulation became faster for large systems, further tests must be performed in order to check whether this advantage is kept or even increased in the flexible case.