This thesis is intended to serve as an introductory guide to ANSYS finite element package for the analysis of impact dynamics. Substructuring technique has been used to reduce the degrees of freedom.

Finite element method is essentially a numerical technique to calculate elastic deformations. However, by introducing some techniques like gap element, the technique can be easily extended to rigid body dynamic analysis. To solve the equation of motion both for rigid body and elastic deformations, direct integration technique is used in this thesis, i.e., Houbolt method.

ANSYS is a large scale general purpose computer program for finite element analysis. Because of its generality and capability of analysis, the package is becoming one of the most popular and powerful tools in structural analysis. However, since the package is so big that it takes a while for the beginner to fully understand its operation.

This thesis is hoped to provide basic concepts and numerical theories for the beginners to use this package in a consistant manner, especially in the case of impact dynamics, since ANSYS manual fails to give a clear explanation on the topic.