Analysis of Multi-Body Systems With Revolute Joint Wear

Clearances exist in all joints in multi-body system, but traditional dynamic analysis method often treats joints as ideal or perfect, ignoring joint clearance, which leads to a large error in the results. Joint clearance can cause structure vibration, bring some peaks to dynamic response, which is bad to the reliability of the system. And clearance also led to joint wear, it makes the clearance get larger with the increasing of working time. In a word, joint clearance will degenerate the performance of the multi-body system or even cause system failure. In this paper, a slider-crank mechanism is used for example, apply multi-body dynamics software to establish the mechanism simulation model, the joint with clearance was replaced by a contact unit, after calculate the contact force and the relative sliding velocity of the contact unit, applying Archard's Wear model to calculate wear depth of each segment in bushing circumference, and then update the geometry profile of bushing in the multi-body model. Through repeating the above process, the joint wear prediction and the dynamic response of the multi-body system after predetermined cycles can be obtained.