A deformation approach to stress distribution in flexible multibody systems

In this paper, methods for stress analysis in flexible multibody systems ar e discussed and the deformation approach is extended for application to sta ndard multipurpose FEM programs. The proposed method allows the evaluation of the stress distributions in flexible bodies by a standard FEM program us ing the full deformation information at each time step as input. In additio n, the stress trajectories at a selected set of nodes of the finite element model are available by superposition of the normalized stress matrices mul tiplied by the corresponding elastic coordinates. Special emphasis is given to the description of the procedure to obtain the required stress matrices from the FEM program. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to a flexi ble robot using the FEM program ANSYS.