Dynamic modeling of flexible multibody systems with complex geometry via finite cell method of absolute nodal coordinate formulation

Practical multibody systems usually consist of flexible bodies of complex shapes, but existing dynamic modeling methods work efficiently only for the systems with bodies of simple and regular shapes. This study proposes a novel computational method for simulating dynamics of flexible multibody systems with flexible bodies of complex shapes via an integration of the finite cell method (FCM) and the absolute nodal coordinate formulation. The classic mesh of FCM is not aligned to the body boundaries, leading to a large number of integration points in cut cells. This study utilizes the Boolean FCM with compressed sub-cell method to reduce the number of integration points and improve computation efficiency. Seven static and dynamic numerical examples are used to validate the proposed method.