Hamiltonian Based Parallel Formulation for Open-loop Multibody System Dynamics

The authors present a novel approach for the analysis of multibody system dynamics based on the Hamilton's equations of motion using joint canonical coordinates. The proposed Hamiltonian based divide and conquer formulation (HDCA) allows the use of massively parallel computing architectures due to the binary-tree structure of the algorithm. In this paper, only articulated, open-loop kinematic chains are taken into account. Joint velocities, joint momenta, and impulsive reaction loads at joints are efficiently computed with the use of HDCA algorithm. In this paper the HDCA formulation is applied for the dynamics simulation of open-loop chain involving 16 rigid bodies interconnected by revolute joints. The numerical results are compared to the outcome recorded by using acceleration based counterparts such as original Featherstone's DCA algorithm [1], and MSC. ADAMS commercial software.