Space-time rigid multibody dynamics

In this contribution, we apply space-time formulation on constrained rigid body dynamics. In particular, we discretize directly Hamilton’s principle using appropriate space-time approximation spaces for the variational problem. Moreover, we make use of a rotationless formulation for the rigid bodies, and thus we have to define appropriate approximation spaces for the Lagrange multipliers as well. Moreover, we make use of Livens’ principle, introducing independent quantities for the position, velocity, and momentum, where the latter can be considered as Lagrange multipliers, and we apply this concept to the space-time rigid body formulation. Finally, we demonstrate the convergence of the different approaches and the superiority in terms of computational effort, and thus total energy consumption of dynamical simulations.