A 3D finite element method for flexible multibody systems

An efficient finite element (FE) formulation for the simulation of multibody systems is derived from Hamilton's principle. According to the classical assumptions of multibody systems, a large rotation formulation has been chosen, where large rotations and large displacements, but only small deformations of the single bodies are taken into account. The strain tensor is linearized with respect to a co-rotated frame. The present approach uses absolute coordinates for the degrees of freedom and forms an alternative to the floating frame of reference formulation that is based on relative coordinates and describes deformation with respect to a co-rotated frame. Due to the modified strain tensor, the present formulation distinguishes significantly from standard nodal based nonlinear FE methods. Constraints are defined in integral form for every pair of surfaces of two bodies. This leads to a small number of constraint equations and avoids artificial stress singularities. The resulting mass and stiffness matrices are constant apart from a transformation based on a single rotation matrix for each body. The particular structure of this transformation allows to prevent from the usually expensive factorization of the system Jacobian within implicit time--integration methods. The present method has been implemented and tested with the FE-package NGSolve and specific 3D examples are verified with a standard beam formulation.