An analysis method for system with rigid and extremely flexible components by the use of the analogy with contact problem of rigid bodies

Abstract

In recent years, a system with rigid and extremely flexible components (hereinafter called “SREF”) are often employed for satellite systems in order to realize various vast structures in orbit, and flexible components are made of strings, membrane and so on. In general, flexible component of such a system has two states, one is the state with tensional force and the other is without tensional force. Therefore, state transition of the system arises depending on its configuration, and then careful treatments are required for the analysis of such a system, because number of the combination of state increases dramatically depending on the number of mass and flexible component. Eventually, such an increase of components results in the computational difficulty in the analysis of such a system. Authors have found analogy between the state transition of the SREF and contact problem described by linear complementary problem which was developed by Pfeiffer et al., thus similar procedure can be employed for the analysis of the motion of SREF. In this paper, considering such an analogy and introducing some assumptions, state transition problems for SREF are formulated as liner complementarity problem and effective analysis method for dynamic behavior for SREF is proposed. In order to show the validity of the proposed method, some numerical analyses are performed and physical interpretations of the obtained results are discussed. Furthermore, comparison of the numerical analysis between experimental results shows the validity and advantage of the proposed method.

Keywords

• flexible multibody system
• contact problem
• linear complementary problem
• unilateral contact
• string
• numerical analysis
• experimental validation