A Comparison of Two Approaches of Handling Contacts in Rigid Multibody Dynamics
Abstract
This paper is based on my work completed during an eight-week internship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My work was to contribute to a research program aimed at using new software that handles contacts in rigid multibody dynamics much faster than the traditional dynamic simulation software used. This new approach seems to be promising and the long run goals of this research program is to be able to simulate very complex models using this software package which will make much faster simulation and therefore a lot of time is saved, more data is obtained, and therefore designs are improved. The first parts of my work was to get familiar with this new software, called Chrono::Engine and try to run some demo tutorials, as well as trying to understand the code and the approach that was used into handling contacts. Then I had to get familiar with one of the most famous simulation software packages used in the market, ADAMS/View (Automatic Dynamic Analysis of Mechanical Systems) and run the simulation of a very complex hydraulic excavator model after thoroughly investigating the model then to monitor some variables and note down the results.
The second part of my work was to run a same model in Chrono::Engine and ADAMS/View that has many contacts and compare the CPU time that each of the software needs in order to complete the simulation of the model. This experiment was aimed at looking into the speed of the simulation and to investigate how efficient and powerful is Chrono::Engine. After results are obtained, we were able to make a quick conclusion that calls for future work in this domain, in order to be able to handle and simulate very complex