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Section: New Results

Numerical analysis and simulation of mechanical systems with constraints

Event-capturing schemes for nonsmooth mechanical systems

Participant : Vincent Acary.

To perform the numerical time integration of nonsmooth mechanical systems, the family of event-capturing time–stepping schemes are the most robust and efficient tools. Nevertheless, they suffer from several drawbacks : a) a low–order accuracy (at best at order one), b) a drift phenomena when the unilateral constraints are treated at the velocity level and c) a poor “energetic” behavior in terms of stabilizing the high–frequency dynamics. We proposed self-adapting schemes by applying time–discontinuous Galerkin methods to the measure differential equation in [28] . In order to satisfy in discrete time, the impact law and the constraints at the position and the velocity level, an adaptation of the well-known Gear–Gupta–Leimkuhler approach has been developed. In [58] , the approach is algorithmically specified, improved and applied to nonlinear multi-contact examples with friction. It is compared to other numerical schemes and it is shown that the newly proposed integration scheme yields a unified behavior for the description of contact mechanical problems. Especially, we provide time-integration of the nonimpulsive dynamics with semi–explicit Runge–Kutta method previously developed for differential algebraic equations.

Numerical time–integration methods for event-detecting schemes.

Participants : Vincent Acary, Bernard Brogliato, Mounia Haddouni.

The CIFRE thesis of M. Haddouni concerns the numerical simulation of mechanical systems subject to holonomic bilateral constraints, unilateral constraints and impacts. This work is performed in collaboration with ANSYS and the main goal is to improve the numerical time–integration in the framework of event-detecting schemes. Between nonsmooth events, time integration amounts to numerically solving a differential algebraic equations (DAE) of index 3. We have compared dedicated solvers (Explicit RK schemes, Half-explicit schemes, generalizes α-schemes) that solve reduced index formulations of these systems. Since the drift of the constraints is crucial for the robustness of the simulation through the evaluation of the index sets of active contacts, we have proposed some recommendations on the use of the solvers of dedicated to index-2 DAE. A manuscript has been submitted to Multibody System Dynamics.

Multibody systems with clearances (dynamic backlash)

Participants : Vincent Acary, Bernard Brogliato, Narendra Akadkhar.

The PhD thesis of N. Akadkhar under contract with Schneider Electric concerns the numerical simulation of mechanical systems with unilateral constraints and friction, where the presence of clearances in imperfect joints plays a crucial role. A first work deals with four-bar planar mechanisms with clearances at the joints, which induce unilateral constraints and impacts, rendering the dynamics nonsmooth. The objective is to determine sets of parameters (clearance value, restitution coefficients, friction coefficients) such that the system's trajectories stay in a neighborhood of the ideal mechanism (i.e. without clearance) trajectories. The analysis is based on numerical simulations obtained with the projected Moreau-Jean time-stepping scheme. These results have been reported in [37] . It is planned to extend these simulations to frictional cases and to mechanisms of circuit breakers.