Multibody Free Software for Teaching Purposes

This paper presents the approach currently followed by our research team in teaching multibody dynamics to aerospace engineering students at the University “Politecnico di Milano”, Italy. The high level of complexity in multibody dynamics, both in terms of the physical phenomena that are modeled and of architecture of the numerical codes needed to solve them, makes this task extremely hard, especially with current, very tight time constraints. A good trade-off between the rigor in teaching the essential theory and the complexity of the applications needs to be find to allow students to grow an adequate level of awareness in the usage of this tools. Currently, the “dilemma” is solved by giving students access to the multibody dynamics free software MBDyn for both analysis and development. This exposes students to different aspects of multibody dynamics ranging from practical programming to numerical and physical modeling of mechanical and multidisciplinary systems.