An integrated system for computer aided design and analysis of multibody systems

An integrated system for design and analysis of multibody systems has been developed and is described in this paper. The use of the system is demonstrated through the example provided. The system consists of a commercially available CAD program and a multibody system analysis code developed at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, These tools are integrated using a relational database, the structure of which was developed at Luleå University of Technology, in order to get a complete system for design and analysis of multibody systems. The main gains from the integrated system are the possibilities of using calculated component data like mass and moment of inertia from the CAD program in the simulation models, the automatic formulation of input files for the analysis code, and finally the visualization of simulation results using the surface data of the solid models. The interactive structured query language (ISQL) of the database management system provides the possibility of examining the components of the multibody system during the design work and before any simulation is performed.