Demystifying Multibody Dynamics via Undergraduate Projects: an Educational Challenge (Keynote)

Today, multibody dynamics simulation packages are more and more in use in industries. Most of these software are distributed by commercial companies and have been developed by various research teams having previously published scientific papers describing the details of their methods. However, software implementation packages without a detailed theoretical manual are unfortunately not rare and the training courses organized by those companies focus on the working features of their own codes and less on the theoretical bases. As a consequence, there is a real danger of practical engineers misusing a multibody code because they are not aware of the underlying hypotheses and/or limitations included in the code. In facing that situation, and since the number of engineers who are potential users of such software is growing, there is a real need for including the field of Multibody Dynamics (MBD) in a standard engineering education curriculum. Teaching multibody dynamics responds to a specific industrial demand. But in addition to doing that, and thanks to the very large class of practical applications covered by the field, MBD can also be very useful in the global engineering education context. In particular, three basic domains are immediately concerned: classical mechanics, mathematics and numerical methods. We claim that there is a real educational challenge in organizing an activity in which these three domains strongly interact, which helps student appreciate the interest of the underlying theories and which deals with realistic applications and problems to be solved.