Symbolic integration of multibody system dynamics with the finite element method

With the widespread use of computer-aided engineering (CAE) to solve computational mechanics problems, engineering design has become more accurate and efficient. The integration of the finite element method (FEM) and flexible multibody dynamics (FMD) is a typical application of computational mechanics. It constitutes an important contribution to engineering development, but its potential is restrained by numerical computation. Computational time is a critical factor that influences the efficiency and cost of design and analysis. The advent of symbolic computation enables faster simulation code, but the symbolic integration of FEM and FMD is at the initial stages. A general symbolic integration procedure is presented in this paper. The performance of the symbolic model is compared with models from the literature and numerically-based commercial software.