Abstract
Since the contribution of lightweight components in the total energy of a system is small, the inertia effects are sometimes ignored via replacing them to massless links. A massless link, which is sometimes called as a composite joint, connects two adjacent bodies keeping the relative degrees of freedoms. For a revolute-spherical massless link, one edge is connected to an adjacent body with a revolute joint and the other edge is linked to another body with a spherical joint. Using velocity transformation technique, it is possible to combine the generality of Cartesian coordinates in modeling and the efficiency of relative coordinates in simulation. In this paper, velocity transformation matrix of a revolute-spherical massless link is formulated and implemented as a joint module in a vehicle dynamic analysis program. Numerical examples are presented to verify the formulation.