Treatment of Constrained Multibody Dynamic Systems with Uncertainties

This study addresses the critical need for computational tools to model complex nonlinear multibody dynamic systems in the presence of parametric and external uncertainty. Polynomial chaos has been used extensively to model uncertainties in structural mechanics and in fluids, but to our knowledge they have yet to be applied to multibody dynamic simulations. We show that the method can be successfully applied to quantify uncertainties in time domain and frequency domain for constrained multibody dynamic systems.