Numerical Analysis of Flexible Multibody Systems

Flexible multibody systems featurea coupled mathematical model with ODEs or DAEs governing the gross motion and PDEs describing the elastic deformation of particular bodies.Frequently, semidiscretization of elastic members leads to a stiff mechanical system with widely different time scales. Thispaper investigates the behavior of numerical time integration methodsat flexible multibody systems and gives some recommendations.Simulation results for a slider crank mechanism and a truck modelillustrate what can go wrong and how implicit methods like RADAU5 can beeffectively applied.