Comparison of various techniques for modelling flexible beams in multibody dynamics (Q1362162)

This paper presents an extensive investigation into discretization techniques of flexible beams, in a pure multibody context. In particular, it is shown that shape functions based on power series monomials are very suitable and versatile to model beams as a part of a multibody system. Thus, the proposed methodology can be considered as an interesting alternative to finite element analysis. A symbolic multibody program, in which various discretization techniques are implemented, is generalized to compute the equations of motion of a general multibody system containing flexible beams.