Dynamic analysis is a branch of mechanics that deals with forces and their relation primarily to the motion, but sometimes also to the equilibrium, of rigid bodies. You can use a dynamic analysis to study the relationship between the forces acting on a rigid body, the mass of the rigid body, and the motion of the rigid body.

Keep the following key points in mind when running a dynamic analysis:

You can evaluate the positions, velocities, accelerations, and reaction forces at the beginning of your dynamic analysis by specifying a zero time duration and running as usual. A suitable time interval for the calculations is determined automatically. If you graph measures from the analysis, the graph will contain only a single line.

Time stepping is the way that the dynamic simulation is driven forward in the time domain using numerical time step integration. Adaptive refers to the fact that the step sizes used in the integration are not fixed. Each time step is adapted to satisfy the condition that the estimated local truncation error of the integration step is less than the accuracy. Other events, such as reaching limits etc., could also shorten the step. The accuracy used by the Mechanism Dynamics engine is equivalent to Relative tolerance multiplied by Characteristic length. You can set the Relative tolerance and the Characteristic length from the Mechanism line in the Model Properties dialog box.

When you set the Minimum interval in the Analysis Definition dialog box, you are setting the maximum time step. The integration step value used in the analysis can be much less. The time step value is determined by the accuracy.

The application engine uses 3rd order Runge Kutta integrators for dynamic analysis. You can use the mdo_integration_method configuration option values to set the integration method.