A Modified Reduced Multibody System Transfer Matrix Method Capable of Parallel Computation

The Reduced Multibody System Transfer Matrix Method (RMSTMM) offers an effective way to determine the generalized accelerations of a system, based on given generalized coordinates and velocities of the system. However, for a certain moment, the dynamics analysis of the system needs to be carried out sequentially in the order of marker to marker, and the time consumption of the dynamics analysis increases linearly with the increase of system size. In order to eliminate the sequential computation limitation and boost computational efficiency, a parallel computing strategy is proposed in this paper. Based on the topology of multibody systems, the concept of element group and corresponding dynamics equation were defined, thus changing the basic processing units from body elements and joint elements into the element groups. Furthermore, the dynamics equation of the element group provides the capacity of parallel computing in the dynamics analysis. Through the numerical examples of rigid chain multibody systems, the calculation results of RMSTMM and parallel computing strategy was compared. The Comparison results indicates that the parallel computing strategy can boost the computation efficiency without changing the accuracy of calculation results.