Scaling Analysis of a Penalty Approach For Multibody Dynamics with Friction and Contact

2 Currently, the most common modeling and simulation software packages use penalty based methods to solve rigid body frictional contacts. The drawback to this is that the integration step sizes are very small, which leads to prohibitively large simulation times. In this report, seven simple multibody systems are modeled and simulated using the commercial software ADAMS. Each trial involves an increasing number of rigid bodies, and the resulting CPU time for a constant simulation time is recorded for the purpose of