Method for analysis of planar motion of system with rigid and extremely flexible components via analogy with contact problem of rigid bodies

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed attempts to employ a system with rigid and extremely flexible components (SREF), usually consisting of strings, membranes, and so on, to realize huge structures for spacecraft in orbit. In general, such flexible components have two states, i.e., with and without tensional force. Previously, the authors proposed an effective method for analyzing SREF motion, which is based on an analogy between the state transitions of the SREF and contact problem of rigid bodies. The state transitions of the SREF are detected via a linear complementarity problem that is used for contact problem in the analysis method proposed by Pfeiffer et al. (Pfeiffer and Glocker, 1996). The authors had applied this method to an SREF consisting of two masses and two strings, where the motion of the system was limited to one dimension. In this study, the method is extended to an SREF having planar motion. As an analysis object, an SREF consisting of two masses and two strings is introduced. Finally, the results of numerical analyses are compared with those of an experiment under same parameters, and the validation of the proposed method is demonstrated by the comparison.

Keywords

• flexible multibody system
• contact problem
• linear complementarity problem
• unilateral contact
• string
• numerical analysis
• planar motion
• experimental validation