Numerical Simulation of Flexible Multibody Systems by Using a Virtual Rigid Body Model

Abstract

In the past decade, interest in multibody system dynamics has grown, leading to several computer codes [1] available for the generation of the motion equations. If in the beginning, only multibody systems with rigid components [2] were considered, weight minimization and large accelerations in many technical problems lead to an increasing tendancy for elastic vibrations. In recent years, many works [3] deal with the dynamical simulation of these systems in which each flexible component undergoes large rigid body motion but small elastic deformations. It results that the motion equations of the whole system involve ordinary differential equations coupled with partial differential equations. Approximated methods are used in which the displacement field of each flexible component is discretized by a Rayleigh-Ritz method leading to a new system with a finite number of degrees of freedom.