A nonsmooth contact dynamic algorithm based on the symplectic method for multibody system analysis with unilateral constraints

In multibody systems, there are not only holonomic bilateral constraints, but also unilateral constraints. The existence of unilateral constraints brings nonsmooth contact dynamic problems into multibody dynamic systems. In this paper, we present an approach based on the symplectic method and the linear complementary method to solve multibody dynamic problems with impact contact. As the symplectic method has good energy conservation and no numerical damping, the proposed approach is expected to inherit these properties for solving nonsmooth problems of multibody dynamic systems. We present multiple numerical examples to demonstrate a high accuracy and good energy conservation behavior of the proposed approach even for large time step sizes.