Efficient computational method for dynamics of flexible multibody systems based on absolute nodal coordinate

The absolute nodal coordinate method has been widely used to study the dynamics of flexible multibody systems. The computational efficiency of this method, however, has much room to be improved. Generally, the second kind of Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor is used to derive the elastic forces and corresponding Jacobians, namely, the partial derivative matrix of the elastic forces with respect to the generalized coordinates. Nevertheless, this method is inefficient enough. Based on the principle of virtual work, the analytical formulations for the elastic forces and their Jacobians are deducted directly by using the first kind of Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor. Numerical example results based on different methods show that the proposed approach is able to enhance the computational efficiency significantly.