On the Dynamics of Multibody Systems with Elastic Beams

In this paper, multibody systems including flexible bodies are investigated. Beginning with a general discussion of flexible bodies in multibody systems, a detailed description of beams is given. Higher order terms in the strain energy function are taken into account, in order to include the effect of centrifugal stiffening and elastic coupling of various vibration modes. Descretizing the elastic members via a Rayleigh-Ritz procedure, integrals containing the chosen shape functions are obtained. These integrals can be calculated in advance, serving as input data for a multibody formalism. A program module is described, which computes all these data representing the flexible body and interacts with a new multibody code.