Abstract
The difficulty of design and control of complicated multibody dynamical systems in mechanical and aerospace engineering requires numerical simulations and has led to development of a considerable number of multibody programs. These multibody programs, honvever, face precision problems and inefficiency by repeated generation of equations of motion, and are often difficult to use. The demand of high precision and the improvement of run time performance and usability can be accomplished by incorporation of symbolic manipulation and a graphical user interface. This research consists of three parts. First, A formalism for generating the Equations of Motion(EOM) of multi-rigid body dynamical systems is derived using a Lagrangian approach, which serves as the theoretical basis for a general as well as a specific purpose multibody software system. Second, the computer code for an automatic EOM generator using the symbolic manipulation software, Maple, is constructed. Finally, a user interface software is developed for graphical object-oriented user inputs using the tool developing window based applications, Tcl/Tk.
Kim, Hye-Young (1996). Symbolic methods for general-purpose and class specific formulation of multibody equations of motion. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -1996 -THESIS -K563.