Impacts occur in many mechanical systems, such as valve control systems, hammer drills or vehicle gearboxes. Important characteristics of impacts are the short time duration, high contact forces, and high frequency phenomena like wave propagation and structural vibrations.
One possibility to analyze the contact process is the fully elastic modeling of the bodies using the finite element method (FEM). To capture all elastic effects during the impact, a finely discretized mesh, especially in the contact area, is needed. Furthermore, the unilateral contact constraint always leads to a nonlinear problem. These mentioned points result in high computation times and, therefore, the global behavior cannot be simulated in reasonable time using FE models.
The efficient analysis of the global motion of dynamic systems is often possible using the approach of rigid multibody systems (MBS). However, during impact elastic deformations cannot be neglected. For the efficient investigation of these deformations, the traditional approach of MBS can be enhanced by elastically deformable bodies, which leads to the approach of flexible multibody systems (FMBS).
This research project focuses on the precise and efficient analysis of the contact behavior using the approach of flexible multibody systems (FMBS) with reduced flexible bodies.
