DYNAMICS OF FLEXIBLE MULTIBODY MECHANICAL SYSTEMS

Abstract

In this paper the formulation and simulation of the dynamical equations of multibody mechanical systems comprising of both rigid and flexible-links are accomplished in two steps: in the first step, each link is considered as an unconstrained body and hence, its Euler-Lagrange (EL) equations are derived disregarding the kinematic couplings; in the second step, the individual-link equations, along with the associated constraint forces, are assembled to obtain the constrained dynamical equations of the multibody system. These constraint forces are then efficiently eliminated by simple matrix multiplication of the said equations by the transpose of the natural orthogonal complement of kinematic velocity constraints to obtain the independent dynamical equations. The equations of motion are solved for the generalized accelerations using the Cholesky decomposition method and integrated using Gear’s method for stiff differential equations. Finally, the dynamical behaviour of the Shuttle Remote Manipulator when performing a typical manoeuvre is determined using the above approach.