A computer method for the dynamic analysis of a system of rigid bodies in plane motion

This paper presents a computer method for the dynamic analysis of a system of rigid bodies in plane motion. The formulation rests upon the idea of replacing a rigid body by a dynamically equivalent constrained system of particles. Newton’s second law is applied to study the motion of the resulting system of particles without introducing any rotational coordinates. A velocity transformation is used to transform the equations of motion to a reduced set. For an open-chain, this process automatically eliminates all of the non-working constraint forces and leads to an efficient integration of the equations of motion. For a closed-chain, suitable joints should be cut and few cut-joints constraint equations should be included. An example of a closed-chain is used to demonstrate the generality and efficiency of the proposed method.