Modeling intermittent contact for flexible multibody systems

This paper consists of two parts. The first part presents a complementarity based recursive scheme to model intermittent contact for flexible multibody systems. A recursive divide-and-conquer framework is used to explicitly impose the bilateral constraints in the entire system. The presented approach is an extension of the hybrid scheme for rigid multibody systems to allow for small deformations in form of local mode shapes. The normal contact and frictional complementarity conditions are formulated at position and velocity level, respectively, for each body in the system. The recursive scheme preserves the essential characteristics of the contact model and formulates a minimal size linear complementarity problem at logarithmic cost for parallel implementation. For a certain class of contact problems in flexible multibody systems, the complementarity based time-stepping scheme requires prohibitively small time-steps to retain accuracy. Modeling intermittent contact for this class of contact problems motivated the development of an iterative scheme. The second part of the paper describes this iterative scheme to model unilateral constraints for a multibody system with relatively fewer contacts. The iterative scheme does not require a traditional complementarity formulation and allows the use of any higher order integration methods. A comparison is then made between the traditional complementarity formulation and the presented iterative scheme via numerical examples.