Mutibody Vehicle Dynamics Analysis Using an Explicit-Implicit Integrator With Subsystem Synthesis Method

This paper proposes an explicit-implicit numerical integration method in order to apply to multibody vehicle dynamics model based on a subsystem synthesis method. The subsystem synthesis method can provide effective means to independently analyze each subsystem with virtual reference body. In the proposed method, the explicit integration is used for solving the equations of motion for a base body, while the implicit integration is utilized for obtaining the solutions of the equations of motion for each subsystem. For the purpose of the application of the implicit formulas easily, a subsystem synthesis method with the Cartesian coordinates is developed. In order to show the application viability and effectiveness of the proposed method, an extensive comparative study has been performed through simulations. Then, the proposed method is compared to conventional implicit integration method applied to an overall system. When simulating the bump run of a multibody vehicle model with compliance effect such as bushing elements, the proposed method achieves about 2 times computational speed-up. Furthermore, the simulation study reveals that the larger the number of the attached subsystems is, the better the computational efficiency of the proposed method is than that of the conventional implicit integration method.Copyright © 2011 by ASME