A Deformation Approach to Stress Distribution in Flexible Multibody Systems

In this paper, methods for stress analysis in flexible multibody systemsare discussed and the deformation approach is extended for applicationto standard multipurpose FEM programs. The proposed method allows theevaluation of the stress distributions in flexible bodies by a standardFEM program using the full deformation information at each time step asinput. In addition, the stress trajectories at a selected set of nodesof the finite element model are available by superposition of thenormalized stress matrices multiplied by the corresponding elasticcoordinates. Special emphasis is given to the description of theprocedure to obtain the required stress matrices from the FEMprogram. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to a flexible robotusing the FEM program ANSYS.