Study on the Reduced Multibody System Transfer Matrix Method of Spatial Curved Beams with Large Motion

The reduced multibody system transfer matrix method (RMSTMM) has a number of advantages over conventional dynamics methods in that there is no need to establish the global dynamics equations with a system inertia matrix, low order of the matrices and high numerical stability. Previous dynamics models for spatial curved beams with large motion and small deformation built by RMSTMM ignored the nonlinear terms in the relationship between strain and deformation, which led to computational divergence in some cases. In this paper, the foreshortening effect of the curved beam is considered and the floating frame method is used to give a more accurate description of the deformation of the nodes. The modal synthesis method is adopted in order to reduce the order of the dynamic equations of the spatial curved beam and the reduced multibody system transfer equations for spatial curved beams with the geometrical nonlinearity is developed which extends the application of the RMSTMM. The numerical example is compared with ABAQUS software to demonstrate the proposed approach.