Cone complementarity approach for dynamic analysis of multiple pendulums

The multibody system dynamics approach allows describing equations of motion for a dynamic system in a straightforward manner. This approach can be applied to a wide variety of applications that consist of interconnected components which may be rigid or deformable. Even though there are a number of applications in multibody dynamics, the contact description within multibody dynamics still remains challenging. A user of the multibody approach may face the problem of thousands or millions of contacts between particles and bodies. The objective of this article is to demonstrate a computationally straightforward approach for a planar case with multiple contacts. To this end, this article introduces a planar approach based on the cone complementarity problem and applies it to a practical problem of granular chains