MULTIBODY DYNAMICS INTEGRATION OF NONLINEAR

FINITE ELEMENT COMPONENTS

Michael Collingridge, Hemant Patel, Stephen Riley, Weixin Shen
MSC Software

ABSTRACT
The demand for dynamic simulations of multi-body systems (MBS) having
nonlinear flexible components is increasing in the design and analysis of
automobile, aerospace and alternative energy systems. This paper presents a
method of integrating nonlinear material, geometry, and boundary capabilities
found in finite element (FE) solutions into MBS simulations.

The method employs a single solver where the equations of motion in

FE domain are converted into phase-space and discretized in time
according to the MBS integrator setting. The resulting linearized FE
equations have dynamic matrices on the left-hand side and residual
forces on the right-hand side. The coupling of the MBS and FE
equations is achieved through the interface connection grids that have
states defined in both domains and constraint equations defined to
enforce kinematic compatibility between the states. Static condensation
of the dynamic matrices and residual vector reduces the FE equations
to the states on the connecting grids and produces terms from nonlinear
FE parts that contributed to the physical and kinematics residual, and
constraint Jacobian. These condensed terms from FE domain are
significantly smaller than the original FE matrices and vectors so that
they can be assembled and readily solved by the MBS solver. The
states of the interior FE grids are recovered from the states of the
connecting grids for post-processing.
Data exchange between the MBS and FE domains and the control of solution
flow are implemented in a Simulation Component Architecture (SCA)
framework with the nonlinear FE solver implemented as a NLFE service. In
addition to accounting for material, geometry and boundary nonlinearities, this
method allows multiple nonlinear FE parts to be efficiently included in a fully
coupled simulation. Matrices and vectors from each FE part are processed
and condensed by separate computing resources and leverage existing HPC
methods for faster solve times.
A number of example problems from different industries are simulated with
this method to examine its numerical accuracy and performance. The
numerical results from these simulations will be presented and compared with
alternative modeling approaches.

SUGGESTED THEMES
Multibody dynamics, nonlinear finite element analysis, multi-physics, dynamic
system simulation, simulation integration, coupled simulation