Motion and multibody dynamics simulation

Fundamental multibody dynamics begin with rigid body motion, the fastest way to develop a critical understanding of your product’s motion characteristics. Simcenter gives you the right tools to perform detailed rigid body dynamics analysis. It’s easy to create your motion model directly from your CAD assembly through an automated conversion process based on assembly constraints, or you can create your model from scratch. You can also quickly model and simulate contact between rigid bodies.

Typical motion simulation represents mechanisms using rigid bodies. While this approach is acceptable for general designs, in many cases, rigid bodies do not accurately represent all the parts and assemblies involved. However, by including the motion of flexible bodies, you can analyze elastic deformation and rigid body motion together. This facilitates a more accurate understanding of part and mechanism performance.

Today’s products often have various controllers, including electronics, hydraulics and software components. The behavior of the control system impacts the hardware mechanical system and vice versa. Therefore, it’s critical for mechanical and control engineers to understand these effects as they develop their systems.

You can increase engineering productivity by simulating and optimizing both the mechanical and control systems concurrently. Simcenter gives you the ability to co-simulate mechanical designs coupled with control systems to verify whether the control system design is robust enough to control the dynamic mechanism and help eliminate costly changes later in development.

Drivetrains, such as gear systems, chain, track and belt systems require specialized capabilities in order to simulate them. For the dynamic simulation of drivetrain elements, Simcenter helps you create and simulate detailed drivetrain models. Simcenter brings in-depth, gearbox-specific ease of use into the multibody simulation process, so you can rapidly move from initial design specifications to accurate simulations. The discrete drivetrain capability also provides a convenient interface to simplify the modeling of complex chain, track and belt systems.

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When designing new assemblies, you need to consider the package space the assembly operates in and whether components will interfere with surrounding geometry. Simcenter helps you solve this problem by providing a true multibody dynamic solver that can compute the displacement and position of assembly components connected to springs, bushings and flexible bodies. Using your geometry directly lets you determine whether you need to make design changes to avoid interference issues.

Unlock new external model integration possibilities by adding a model to a real-time (RT) platform, such as a vehicle simulator. This helps you more accurately reflect the actual physics of a vehicle for how it reacts to driver inputs. Integrate with other multiphysics models and combine with RT simulators and hardware-in-loop (HiL). Re-use existing models or extend the accuracy of RT models by adding more degrees-of-freedom (DOF) than possible with previously reduced models.

Time waveform replication (TWR) uses multibody dynamics capabilities to allow you to build a virtual test rig, calculate the frequency response of a given system, specify target signals, filter and condition the signals and, ultimately, produce conditioned drive signals using an iterative solution process.

Tires play an integral part in the performance of vehicle dynamics simulation. Simcenter allows you to integrate tire models into multibody dynamics models, giving you an accurate prediction of tire-road interactions, ride comfort, and handling performance. Quick and efficient predictions of real-world tire behavior reduce product development time.