It is sometimes desirable to exercise a MOTION statement in an Adams model with data stored in an ASCII file without having to put the contents of the file into an Adams SPLINE statement. A good example of this type of application would be in the validation of Adams vehicle models to objective test data. The validation process required the model to have the same input as the tested vehicle. This input would take the form of a steering wheel angle time history. With this routine, the measured steering wheel angle time history can be input to the Adams model for easy comparison between actual and simulated handling behavior.

The motion time history routine applies a motion magnitude at each time step to a JOINT in Adams. This magnitude is read in from a two column file and is interpolated using a SPLINE function. The input file should be set up with time in seconds as the first column and the motion magnitude as the second. Comments can be placed anywhere in the motion file by placing a ! in the first column of a row. The motion magnitude is scaled and added to a user supplied offset prior to application on a JOINT. The routine supplies Adams the name of the motion time history file through a list file (similar to the tire model). The program will either read the filename out of the default list file, "motfile", or will prompt the user for the name of the list file.

The motion time history routine can be applied to any JOINT in Adams by placing the following USER call statement at the MOTION statement:

MOTION/id, JOINT = ijt , type, FUN = USER ( 1120,imt,scale,offset,ifile,id)

where: