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Rigid-flexible-soft coupling dynamic modeling and analysis of clustered tensegrity

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Abstract

Clustered tensegrity structures, which retain the advantages of the classical tensegrity structure, are better controllable, and provide more possibilities for a wide range of application scenarios. However, the dynamic modeling and analysis of clustered tensegrity structures with the significant characteristic of rigid-flexible-soft coupling have great challenges: (1) Rigid components (rods) and flexible components (classical cables) lead to a dynamic model that has the characteristic of rigid-flexible coupling, which severely limits the efficiency of dynamic simulation; (2) The "soft" characteristic of sliding cable slacking, which makes sliding cables frequently switch between tense and slack states in the actuation process, results in non-smooth dynamic behavior. In this paper, a model smoothing method based on the positional finite element method is proposed for dynamic analysis of clustered tensegrity structures with the rigid-flexible coupling characteristic, which can effectively and controllably filter the elastic high-frequency oscillations in the system without losing the accuracy of structural macroscopic deformation and greatly improve the computational efficiency than the model without smoothing. Then, for the non-smooth dynamics caused by soft characteristic, a nonlinear complementary method for sliding cable slacking is proposed, which makes the numerical simulation of sliding cable slacking and tensioning more stable than the traditional method. Finally, the model smoothing method for rigid-flexible coupling is integrated with the nonlinear complementary method for soft sliding cables, and a rigid-flexible-soft coupling framework that combines the implicit discrete scheme is formed for dynamic modeling and analysis of clustered tensegrity structures. The numerical simulation results show that the rigid-flexible-soft coupling framework can realize efficient, stable, and accurate dynamic analysis of clustered tensegrity structures and provide support for the design of clustered tensegrity structures.

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The data generated or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

The authors are grateful to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U2241263); the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (DUT22ZD211, DUT22QN223).

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Structural Analysis, Optimization and CAE Software for Industrial Equipment, Department of Engineering Mechanics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

    Haijun Peng, Mingji Wang, Hao Yang, Fei Li & Ziyun Kan

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Peng, H., Wang, M., Yang, H. et al. Rigid-flexible-soft coupling dynamic modeling and analysis of clustered tensegrity. Nonlinear Dyn (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-024-09475-1

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