This book contains an edited versIOn of lectures presented at the NATO ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE on VIRTUAL NONLINEAR MUL TIBODY SYSTEMS which was held in Prague, Czech Republic, from 23 June to 3 July 2002. It was organized by the Department of Mechanics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, in cooperation with the Institute B of Mechanics, University of Stuttgart, Germany. The ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE addressed the state of the art in multibody dynamics placing special emphasis on nonlinear systems, virtual reality, and control design as required in...

This book contains an edited versIOn of lectures presented at the NATO ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE on VIRTUAL NONLINEAR MUL TIBODY SYSTEMS which was held in Prague, Czech Republic, from 23 June to 3 July 2002. It was organized by the Department of Mechanics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, in cooperation with the Institute B of Mechanics, University of Stuttgart, Germany. The ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE addressed the state of the art in multibody dynamics placing special emphasis on nonlinear systems, virtual reality, and control design as required in...

During the last decades completely new technologies for high speed railway vehicles have been developed. The primary goals have been to increase traction, axle load, and travelling speed, and to guarantee the safety of the passengers. However, new developments have revealed new limitations: settlement and destruction of the ballast and the subgrade lead to deterioration of the track; irregular wear of the wheels causes an increase in overall load and deterioration in passenger comfort; and damage of the running surfaces of the rail and the wheel is becoming more frequent. These problems have...

The simulation of complex engineering problems often involves an interaction or coupling of individual phenomena, which are traditionally related by themselves to separate fields of applied mechanics. Typical examples of these so- called multifield problems are the thermo-mechanical analysis of solids with coupling between mechanical stress analysis and thermal heat transfer processes, the simulation of coupled deformation and fluid transport mechanisms in porous media, the prediction of mass transport and phase transition phenomena of mixtures, the analysis of sedimentation proces- ses based...

The German Research Council (DFG) decided 1987 to establish a nationwide five year research project devoted to dynamics of multibody systems. In this project universities and research centers cooperated with the goal to develop a general pur- pose multibody system software package. This concept provides the opportunity to use a modular structure of the software, i.e. different multibody formalisms may be combined with different simulation programmes via standardized interfaces. For the DFG project the database RSYST was chosen using standard FORTRAN 77 and an object oriented multibody system...

This volume presents an integrated approach of the common fundamentals of rail and road vehicles based on multibody system dynamics, rolling wheel contact and control system design. The methods presented allow an efficient and reliable analysis of the resulting state equations. The book provides also a better understanding of the basic physical phenomena of vehicle dynamics. Particular attention is paid to developments of future rail and road vehicles including motorcycles.

The simulation of engineering problems often involves an interaction of individual phenomena, which are related to separate fields of applied mechanics. Examples of these multifield problems are the thermo-mechanical analysis of solids with coupling between mechanical stress analysis and thermal heat transfer processes.

This volume contains the proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium on Dynamical Problems for Rigid-elastic Systems and Structures held in Moscow, USSR in May 1990. This symposium brought together scientists working in the fields of multibody system dynamics and finite element systems with special emphasis to modeling, simulation, optimization and control. The scientific lectures were devoted to the following topics: - Modeling and optimization; - Dynamics of systems with elastic constraints; - Vibrations; - Multibody systems. The papers presented indicate the importance of these topics with respect...