DYNAMIC SIMULATION OF MULTIBODY SYSTEMS INCLUDING PLANAR ELASTIC BEAMS USING AUTOLEV

A number of computer codes are available for the automatic generation of the equations of motion of multibody systems formed by rigid bodies . Systems containing deformable components generally cannot be treated readily by these programs. Demonstrates how multibody systems contain ing both rigid and deformable components can be handled with the aid o f Autolev, a symbol manipulator for dynamics, when such components are discretized by a Rayleigh-Ritz procedure. A computer code called Ritz was written to perform this task interactively with Autolev, and a Fo rtran program is generated automatically for the numerical simulation of motions of the system under consideration. The numerical results ar e then converted to Matlab format, so that plotting routines and other facilities available in Matlab can be used to process the results fur ther.