Substructure Analysis of a Flexible System Contact-Impact Event

In this paper, the application of the substructure methodology to contact-impact analysis of flexible multibody systems is validated. Various impact model parameters that affect the model’s accuracy are presented. A contact-impact system is used that consists of a flexible cantilever bar longitudinally struck at its free end by a rigid body moving at a finite velocity. First, a dynamic model using the substructure method is established. Second, the initial conditions of the system’s dynamic responses during contact-impact are derived. Finally, a numeric contact-impact simulation is performed. The excellent agreement between the numeric solutions to both the substructure model and the analytical solutions demonstrates that the substructure model can successfully describe stress wave propagation within flexible bodies during contact-impact. The method can also clearly display the contact force time history and deformation distribution along the bar during contact-impact time and correctly predict the displacement of the contact surface of the flexible bar and the contact duration of the two bodies. It is shown that a larger substructure number will improve the accuracy of the numerical solutions, but an excessive number will lower the model’s accuracy since increasingly fine substructures increase the number of modal coordinates and lead to more serious computational round off errors and longer computational time.