MBDyn sim suite

Intented audiences

This project is addressed to any ambitioned user who wants to carry out dynamic simulations of mechanical, electrical, hydraulic or control systems, i.e. mechanisms assembled of mechanical structures conected by joints and excited by external loads.

Profound skills and experience in the domain of dynamic simulation are benefitial and warmly recommended but not mandatory. Newbies to MBDyn should have a long breath and definitely invest some time in reading the documentation and studying the tutorial examples. (Tip: Really, do this - it's worth the time!)

The Idea - Conceptual Thoughts

This project is intended to set up a free general purpose simulation environement for structural dynamics with the MBDyn software as kernel. MBDyn has strong capabilities in the domain of dynamic simulations of multi-physical systems (e.g. structural,electrical, hydraulic) but as it is a research code it still lacks some basic pre&postprocessing and visualizaton features which are required for an efficient work flow.

The aim of this project is to close these gaps by providing free tools - existing ones and/or new ones - which are adapted to each other by directly working on each others output to form a continuos process chain. The focous shall be on the smooth work flow between the various tools and not on so much on the developement of new software - it's more about adapting __existing__ programs, which should primarily be free software.
As existing software shall be used where suitable and available the project shall not be limited to any specific programming language or operating system, thus being open to any solution which solves a specific task.
The idea is to provide a ready-for-use simulation system to a potential user such as that he can download and directly work with the package. This implies that compiled binaries should be included - in addition to the source code when it is a newly created piece of software OR coming with a link pointing to the main page where the latest version and the sources can be obtained if it is an already existing software from a third party.

The primary goal is to provide a __running__ system, not necessarily the latest version of each tool or model. The package content should cover every aspect of recent simulation systems:

• MODEL-LIBRARY with free models for testing & teaching. Initially emphasis will be layed on the modelling and simulation of wind turbines.
• PRE-PROCESSING tools helping in preparing input data and automatically setting up a bunch of model input files incl. corresponding scripts for automated calculation
• POST-PROCESSING tools covering various tasks which could be performed on the resulting time series output as there are e.g.:
  • format conversion & data compression
  • data editing
  • data analysis: statistics, fft, rainflow counting, time at level analysis, etc.
• VISUALIZATION
  • of the structural model
  • animation of the structural deformation over time
  • (XY)plots of time series
  • plots of other results

What this project is not

THIS IS NOT A REPLACEMENT OR A PARALLEL BRANCH OF THE MBDYN-PROJECT. THE ONLY REFERENCE AND REGULARY MAINTAINED & IMPROVED VERSION OF THE MBDyn - CODE CAN BE FOUND THERE.

In case of any doubts to the correctness or up-to-dateness of the included version fall back to the address above and download the actual & blessed version. There you will also find the latest version of documentation, tutorials, examples and theoretical background of MBDyn.