An efficient method for obtaining the general solution for the force balance equations with hard point contacts

A compact formulation which is more efficient than the traditional pseudoinverse formulation for obtaining the general solution for the force balance equations has been presented previously by the author (1990). With hard point contacts considered, the force balance equations can be decomposed into two sets of rank 3, smaller linear equations if proper coordinate frames of the reference member and at the contact points are chosen. This decomposition, together with the compact formulation, can reduce the steps of the Gaussian elimination process, increase parallelism of the algorithm and therefore, keep the computation time for obtaining the general solution for the force balance equations to a minimum.