Abstract
Randomness exists in engineering. Tolerance, assemble-error, environment temperature and wear make the parameters of a mechanical system uncertain. So the behavior or response of the mechanical system is uncertain. In this paper, the uncertain parameters are treated as random variables. So if the probability distribution of a random parameter is known, the simulation of mechanical multibody dynamics can be made by Monte-Carlo method. Thus multibody dynamics simulation results can be obtained in statistics. A new concept called functional reliability is put forward in this paper, which can be defined as the probability of the dynamic parameters(such as position, orientation, velocity, acceleration etc.) of the key parts of a mechanical multibody system belong to their tolerance values. A flexible mechanical arm with random parameters is studied in this paper. The length, width, thickness and density of the flexible arm are treated as random variables and Gaussian distribution is used with given mean and variance. Computer code is developed based on the dynamic model and Monte-Carlo method to simulate the dynamic behavior of the flexible arm. At the same time the end effector's locating reliability is calculated with circular tolerance area. The theory and method presented in this paper are applicable on the dynamics modeling of general multibody systems.