A Virtual Body and Joint for Constrained Flexible Multibody Dynamics: A Generalized Recursive Formulation

Abstract

This research extends the generalized recursive formulas for the rigid body dynamics to the flexible body dynamics using the backward difference formula and the relative generalized coordinate. When a new force or joint module is added to a general purpose program in the relative coordinate formulations, the modules for the rigid bodies are not reusable for the flexible bodies. Since the flexible body dynamics handles more degrees of freedom than the rigid body dynamics does, implementation of the flexible dynamics module is generally complicated and prone to coding mistakes. In order to overcome the implementation difficulties, a virtual rigid body is introduced at every joint and force reference frames. A virtual flexible body joint is introduced between two body reference frames of the virtual and original bodies. The implementation burden to develop a general purpose dynamic analysis program using the relative coordinate formulation is relieved by the generalized recursive formulas. The notationally compact velocity transformation method is used to derive the equations of motion in the joint space. The terms in the equations of motion which are related to the transformation matrix are classified into several categories each of which recursive formula is developed. Whenever one category of the terms is encountered, the corresponding recursive formula is invoked. Since computation time in a relative coordinate formulation is approximately proportional to the number of the relative coordinates, computational overhead due to the additional virtual bodies and joints is minor. Meanwhile, implementation convenience is dramatically improved.