Dynamic Analysis and Fatigue Life Prediction of a Very Flexible Component in Multibody System

Recently, the finite element absolute nodal coordinate formulation(ANCF) was developed for large deformation analysis of flexible bodies in multi-body dynamics. This formulation is based on finite element procedures and the general continuum mechanics theory to represent elastic forces. In this paper, a computational method, which predicts the dynamic and structural properties of a very flexible beam in a multibody system, is presented based on Euler-Bernoulli beam theory and ANCF. In order to consider the dynamic interaction between a continuous large deformable beam and a rigid multibody system, a combined system equations of motion was derived by adopting absolute nodal coordinates and rigid body coordinates. The efficiency and reliability of the computational results are verified by comparison with a commercial program. These methods can be applied for predicting the dynamic stress and fatigue life of the wire harness used in a robot system. The process of predicting the fatigue life using the proposed method in this paper may be applied to continuous mechanical parts of various dynamic systems.