A number of computer codes are available for the automatic generation of the equations of motion of multibody systems formed by rigid bodies. Systems containing deformable components generally cannot be treated readily by these programs. Demonstrates how multibody systems containing both rigid and deformable components can be handled with the aid of Autolev, a symbol manipulator for dynamics, when such components are discretized by a Rayleigh‐Ritz procedure. A computer code called Ritz was written to perform this task interactively with Autolev, and a Fortran program is generated automatically for the numerical simulation of motions of the system under consideration. The numerical results are then converted to Matlab format, so that plotting routines and other facilities available in Matlab can be used to process the results further.
