Application of Scaling to Multibody Dynamics Simulations

This paper will examine the importance of applying scaling to the equations of motion for multibody dynamic systems when applied to industrial applications. If a Cartesian formulation is used to formulate the equations of motion of a multibody dynamic system the resulting equations are a set of differential algebraic equations (DAEs). The algebraic components of the DAEs arise from appending the joint equations used to model revolute, cylindrical, translational and other joints to the Newton-Euler dynamic equations of motion. Stability issues can arise in an ill-conditioned Jacobian matrix of the integration method this will result in poor convergence of the implicit integrator’s Newton method. The repeated failures of the Newton’s method will require a small step size and therefore simulations that require long run times to complete. Recent advances in rescaling the equations of motion have been proposed to address this problem. This paper will see if these methods or a variant addresses not only stability concerns, but also efficiency. The scaling techniques are applied to the Gear-Gupta-Leimkuhler (GGL) formulation for multibody problems by embedding them into the commercial multibody code (MBS) Virtual. Lab Motion and then use them to solve an industrial sized automotive example to see if performance is improved.