It is with great pleasure to announce the release of the Nikra-DAP FreeCAD WorkBench (revision 1)
The FreeCAD Nikra-DAP WorkBench is a planar multibody dynamics workbench that is based on Prof. Nikravesh's DAP solver. (DAP: Dynamics Analysis Program) Any multibody planar mechanism can be modelled in FreeCAD and solved in Nikra-DAP. You can create an animation of your mechanism as well as comprehensive output plots of positions, velocities and energies.
Here is an example of a Planar Dynamic Mechanism you can model and solve in Nikra-DAP (Tutorial)
Acknowledgements:
Information on the Nikra-DAP team can be found here
Prof. Nikravesh's (University of Arizona) work on computational dynamics has led to the creation of the Nikra-DAP workbench. Formulations were adapted from Planar Multibody Dynamics (Parviz E. Nikravesh) 2nd Ed
A big thank you to our funders:
- This project is funded through Engineering X, an international collaboration founded by the Royal Academy of Engineering and Lloyd's Register Foundation.
- This project is also part of the Engineering X: Engineering Skills Where They are Most Needed Mission, which seeks to support the delivery of skills and education programmes that will lead to development of much needed engineering skills capacity, enhanced safety standards, and infrastructure that will remain safe and fit for purpose.
Installation:
All files can be found here: https://github.com/ljplessis/Nikra-DAP
This workbench can be installed locally by copying the Nikra-DAP file into the Mod folder in your FreeCAD directory.
In order for this workbench to work correctly, FreeCAD Plot as well as Assembly 4 should also be installed on your computer through the addon manager.
Usage:
A Basic Overview as well as Tutorials can be found in the ReadMe file.
If you have any queries, issues or recommendations, please feel free to reach out to either @Varnu01 or @karolis.
Kind regards
The Nikra-DAP team