Dynamic Simulation of the Multibody Model of the Rabinowicz Test for Friction Modeling in the SIMSCAPE Environment

This study aims to investigate the performances of ode15s and ode23t solvers in the SIMSCAPE environment during the dynamic simulation of multibody systems including dry friction. In this context, the Rabinowicz test, which is a classical example to investigate friction effects in mechanical systems, is analyzed as the benchmark study. Using only built-in functions available in the SIMSCAPE environment, a 1D-3D combined multibody model of the Rabinowicz test is developed. The performances of the solvers under consideration are examined in terms of accuracy and computational time. While the integral of the absolute error metric is used to evaluate the accuracy for the different tolerance values, the classical stopwatch functions available in the MATLAB environment are used to measure the computational time. As a result of the evaluations, it is observed that ode23t performs better than ode15s in the simulation of the Rabinowicz test and within the tolerance range considered.