Rigid Body Dynamics Vs. Transient Structural for Rigid Bodies — Lesson 2

What is the difference between rigid body dynamics (RBD) and transient structural analysis for all rigid bodies?

For pure rigid bodies, both solvers have been validated against each other, but RBD is fundamentally formulated for large motion, large rotation, and highly nonlinear solutions.

This implies:

• Robust strategies for adaptive time-stepping, whether it is using implicit or explicit time integration (since software version 17.2, for contact-dominated models, the Moreau-Jean “MJ time-stepping” algorithm is the recommended method and is implicit)
• Dedicated techniques to deal with very large rotation increments over one step
• High fidelity: consistent tangent matrices, energy conservative integration schemes, Lagrange multipliers formulation for contact, and full nonlinear formulation of equations of motion
• Allows for loads dependent on model state
• Solver tuned for a relatively small number of degrees of freedom but a large number of time steps