Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Nonlinear Dynamics of Highly Flexible Multibody Systems

Presented here is a new displacement-based total-Lagrangian finite element formulation for multibody systems with highly flexible beams undergoing huge elastic deformations. The geometrically beam theory fully accounts for geometric nonlinearities and initial curvatures by using Jaumman stress and strain measures, an exact coordinate transformation, and orthogonal virtual rotations. Nonlinear dynamics of a slewing beam driven by a dc motor is used to illustrate the proposed methodology and its accuracy. Numerical results are compared with experimental dynamic deformations measured by a camera-based EAGLE500 digital real-time motion analysis system. Comparisons show that the proposed methodology is accurate and versatile.