Dynamic simulation of crankshaft multibody systems

General multibody system approaches are often not sufficient for specific situations in applications to yield an efficient and accurate solution. We concentrate on the simulation of the crankshaft dynamics which is characterized by flexible bodies and force laws describing the interaction between the bodies. The use of the floating frame of reference approach in our model leads to an index-2 DAE system. The algebraic constraints originate from the reference conditions and the normalization equation for the quaternions. For the time integration of this system, two aspects have to be taken into account: firstly, for efficiency exploiting the structure of the system and using parallelization. Secondly, consistent initial values also with respect to a related index-3 system have to be computed in order to compute missing initial velocities and to reduce transient phenomena.