A comparative study of recursive methods (Q1904934)

The paper deals with the application of recursive methods to the generation of dynamical equations of multibody systems. The authors show that only two factors determine the overall efficiency of these methods, namely the choice of an appropriate reference point for the kinematic and kinetic equations, and the frame of decomposition used to represent the involved vectors and tensors. The minimum number of operations is achieved for the case where the hinge points are chosen as local reference points, and the algorithm is evaluated in local reference frames of the bodies. It appears that for more than seven bodies this formulation requires less operations than the most efficient implementation of a nonrecursive composite rigid body method.