Efficient Modal Approach for Flexible Multibody Dynamic Simulation

Abstract A flexible body formulation is presented for efficient flexible multibody dynamic simulation of mechanical systems that contain large-scale, finite-element, flexible body models. With this formulation, the equations of motion of flexible bodies, as well as their linearized form required for implicit integration, are expressed such that all terms that depend on the dimension of the finite-element models of flexible bodies can be evaluated in a preprocessing stage. This enables efficient simulation, even with very detailed finite-element models that are found in industrial applications.