In this study, a general purpose computer program is developed for the dynamic analysis of multibody system using relative joint coordinate method. In general relative joint coordinate method is more efficient than Cartesian coordinate method because it uses a minimal set of coordinates. The program currently includes five joints, two driver and two force elements as its library.
Here the topological structure of the system is identified through graphical processing. In order to convert a closed loop system to an open loop system, a cut-joint is selected by Kruskal's algorithm.
The resulting governing equations(Differential-Algebraic Equations) are solved numerically by a hybrid method. In fact, the computational efficiency is influenced not only by formulation of the governing equations but also by the numerical technique for DAE. The influence of each parameters to the numerical efficiency in the hybrid method is discussed.
The developed program is compared with DADS software quantitatively through the applications to some examples of multibody mechanical systems.
