The important interaction between modeling and solution techniques is demonstrated by using a simplified multibody model of a truck thoughout the book to illustrate all key concepts.

The important interaction between modeling and solution techniques is demonstrated by using a simplified multibody model of a truck thoughout the book to illustrate all key concepts.

This volume provides the international multibody dynamics community with an up-to-date view on the state of the art in this rapidly growing field of research which now plays a central role in the modeling, analysis, simulation and optimization of mechanical systems in a variety of fields and for a wide range of industrial applications. This book contains selected contributions delivered at the ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on Multibody Dynamics, which was held in Brussels, Belgium and organized by the Université catholique de Louvain, from 4th to 7th July 2011. Each paper reflects the State-of-Art in the application of Multibody Dynamics to different areas of engineering. They are enlarged and revised versions of the communications, which were enhanced in terms of self-containment and tutorial quality by the authors. The result is a comprehensive text that constitutes a valuable reference for researchers and design engineers which helps to appraise the potential for the application of multibody dynamics methodologies to a wide range of areas of scientific and engineering relevance.

This monograph, written from a numerical analysis perspective, aims to provide a comprehensive treatment of both the mathematical framework and the numerical methods for flexible multibody dynamics. Not only is this field permanently and rapidly growing, with various applications in aerospace engineering, biomechanics, robotics, and vehicle analysis, its foundations can also be built on reasonably established mathematical models. Regarding actual computations, great strides have been made over the last two decades, as sophisticated software packages are now capable of simulating highly complex structures with rigid and deformable components. The approach used in this book should benefit graduate students and scientists working in computational mechanics and related disciplines as well as those interested in time-dependent partial differential equations and heterogeneous problems with multiple time scales. Additionally, a number of open issues at the frontiers of research are addressed by taking a differential-algebraic approach and extending it to the notion of transient saddle point problems.

This volume contains the edited version of selected papers presented at the Nato Advanced Study Institute on "Computer Aided Analysis of Rigid and Flexible Mechanical Systems", held in Portugal, from the 27 June to 9 July, 1994. The present volume can be viewed as a natural extension of the material addressed in the Institute which was published by KLUWER in the NATO ASI Series, Vol. 268, in 1994. The requirements for accurate and efficient analysis tools for design of large and lightweight mechanical systems has driven a strong interest in the challenging problem of multibody dynamics. The development of new analysis and design formulations for multi body systems has been more recently motivated with the need to include general features such as: real-time simulation capabilities, active control of machine flexibilities and advanced numerical methods related to time integration of the dynamic systems equations. In addition to the presentation of some basic formulations and methodologies in dynamics of multibody systems, including computational aspects, major applications of developments to date are presented herein. The scope of applications is extended to vehicle dynamics, aerospace technology, robotics, mechanisms design, intermittent motion and crashworthiness analysis. Several of these applications are explored by many contributors with a constant objective to pace development and improve the dynamic performance of mechanical systems avoiding different mechanical limitations and difficult functional requirements, such as, for example, accurate positioning of manipulators.

... users on the other side of the fence ... have long said that until we numerical analysts take time to write good software and get it out to the users, our ideas will not be put into action. -C.W. GEAR IN [AIKE85] This monograph is based on my doctoral thesis which I wrote dur ing my work at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) at the Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg. One of my intentions was and still is to stress the practical aspects leading from the conception of mathematical methods to their effective and efficient realization as scientific software. In my own experience, I had always wished there had been something to guide me through this engineering process which accompanies the basic research for which there were nu merous treatises dealing, e.g., with mathematical theory for descriptor systems. Therefore, I felt that writing this monograph provided a good op portunity to try to fill this gap by looking at software engineering from a scientific computing angle. Thus, this monograph contains a chap ter on software engineering with numerous examples from the work on MBSSIM. This is meant as a beacon for those of us who really do want to produce scientific software instead of just hacking some code. On the other hand, for those more interested in the theory of differential-algebraic equations, many bibliographical references have been included where appropriate.