An asynchronous, variational method for simulating elastica in complex contact and impact scenarios is developed. Asynchronous Variational Integrators [1] (AVIs) are extended to handle contact forces by associating dierent time steps to forces instead of to spatial elements. By discretizing a barrier potential by an innite sum of nested quadratic potentials, these extended AVIs are used to resolve contact while obeying momentum- and energy-conservation laws. A series of two- and three-dimensional examples illustrate the robustness and good energy behavior of the method.
The value of energy and momentum conserving algorithms has been well established for the analysis of highly non-linear systems, including those characterized by the nonsmooth non-linearities of an impact event. This work proposes an improved integration scheme for frictionless dynamic contact, seeking to preserve the stability properties of exact energy and momentum conservation without the heretofore unavoidable compromise of violating geometric admissibility as established by the contact constraints. The physically motivated introduction of a discrete contact velocity provides an algorithmic framework that ensures exact conservation locally while remaining independent of the choice of constraint treatment, thus making full conservation equally possible in conjunction with a penalty regularization as with an exact Lagrange multiplier enforcement. The discrete velocity effects are incorporated as a post-convergence update to the system velocities, and thus have no direct effect on the non-linear solution of the displacement equilibrium equation. The result is a robust implicit algorithmic treatment of dynamic frictionless impact, appropriate for large deformations and fully conservative for a range of geometric constraints. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The purpose of this work is twofold. First, we demonstrate analytically that the classical Newmark family as well as related integration algorithms are variational in the sense of the Veselov formulation of discrete mechanics. Such variational algorithms are well known to be symplectic and momentum preserving and to often have excellent global energy behavior. This analytical result is veried through numerical examples and is believed to be one of the primary reasons that this class of algorithms performs so well. Second, we develop algorithms for mechanical systems with forcing, and in particular, for dissipative systems. In this case, we develop integrators that are based on a discretization of the Lagrange d'Alembert principle as well as on a variational formulation of dissipation. It is demonstrated that these types of structured integrators have good numerical behavior in terms of obtaining the correct amounts by which the energy changes over the integration run. This article considers the design and implementation of variable-timestep methods for simulating holonomically constrained mechanical systems. Symplectic variable stepsizes are briefly discussed, and we consider time-reparameterization techniques employing a time-reversible (symmetric) integration method to solve the equations of motion. We give several numerical examples, including a simulation of an elastic (inextensible, unshearable) rod undergoing large deformations and collisions with the sides of a bounding box. Numerical experiments indicate that adaptive stepping can significantly smooth the numerical energy and improve the overall efficiency of the simulation.