Comparison of various techniques for modelling flexible beams in multibody dynamics

The modelling of flexible elements in mechanical systems has been widely investigated through several methods issuing from both the area of structural mechanics and the field of multibody dynamics. As regards the latter discipline, beside the problem of the generation of the multibody equations of motion, the choice of a spatial discretization method for modelling flexible elements has always been considered as a critical phase of the modelling. Although this subject is abundantly tackled in the open-literature, the latter probably lacks an objective comparison between the most commonly used approaches. This contribution presents an extensive investigation of several discretization techniques of flexible beams, in a pure multibody context. In particular, it is shown that shape functions based on power series monomials are very suitable and versatile to model beams being part of a multibody system and thus constitutes an interesting alternative to finite element analysis. For this purpose, a symbolic multibody program, in which various discretization techniques were implemented, was generalized to compute the equations of motion of a general multibody system containing flexible beams.