Second-Order Design Sensitivity Analysis of Mechanical System Dynamics by a Mixed Direct Differentiation Adjoint Variable Method

This paper presents a new approach to second order sensitivity analysis of multibody dynamics. Adjoint variables together with direct differentiation are used to derive first- and second-order derivatives of measures of dynamic response with respect to design variables. It is shown that the proposed method can be compared advantageously to the fully adjoint variable method proposed by Haug in terms of simplicity and numerical cost. In order to validate the algorithm, a simple oscillator example proposed by Haug is solved analytically and by the mixed method, with identical results.