An energy preserving/decaying scheme for constrained nonlinear multibody systems

Abstract

Several numerical time integration methods for multibody system dynamics are described: an energy preserving scheme and three energy decaying ones, which introduce high-frequency numerical dissipation in order to annihilate the nondesired high-frequency oscillations. An exhaustive analysis of these four schemes is done, including their formulation, and energy preserving and decaying properties by taking into account the presence of nonlinear algebraic constraints and the incrementation of finite rotations. A new energy preserving/decaying scheme is developed, which is well suited for either stiff or nonstiff nonlinearly constrained multibody systems. Examples on a series of test cases show the performance of the algorithms.