A verification of the multi-body dynamics based on impulse-basemethod

In this paper, an impulse-based method is applied instead of penalty method to deal with the collision between rigid bodies. In penalty method, the interpenetration of the two related rigid bodies is used to calculate the contact force and several parameters like the coefficient of restitution, Young’s module and Poission’s ratio are needed to adjust for different materials. In addition, for colliding contact problem, whose interval is very short, a tiny time increment is needed, or the simulation result will be very unstable. However, as penalty method is easy to implement and understand, it is widely adopted in the engineering simulations. On the contrary, using impulse-based method can also allow us to use a larger time increment to improve the efficiency of the simulation with only one parameter (coefficient of restitution) to adjust. By only considering the relative velocity at the contact point, the interpenetration between the related rigid bodies is not needed and the process of the entire collision is simulated in one time increment to prevent a deeper interpenetration, which also mitigates the error from the unrealistic interpenetration.