Scalability of Rigid Body Frictional Contacts with Non-primitive Collision Geometry

1 Multibody Dynamic simulation involving many rigid body frictional contacts is currently difficult due to the method many commercial simulation software packages utilize. For example, the Simulation Based Engineering Lab (SBEL) regularly utilizes the popular virtual prototyping software package MSC/ADAMS, which deals with rigid body collisions using the penalty method. This method scales quadratically as the number of colliding bodies increases; therefore, it is not suitable for simulations with many rigid body frictional contacts. Engineering systems such as pharmaceutical drug packing processes, pebble bed nuclear reactors, vehicles navigating off-road terrain and conveyor belts contain many colliding bodies and currently cannot be simulated using techniques with poor scalability. When convex non-primitive shapes are used as collision objects, they can be represented by approximating the surface of the object as a triangle mesh. Non-convex shapes can be represented by combining a set of convex meshes, which allows engineering parts with very complex geometry to be modeled. In order to simulat