The Pulley Element

Abstract

The pulley is used in a number of structures for the mechanical advantage it gives. This paper presents an approach for the calculation of a pulley-cable system using a special pulley element in the finite element method. The Lagrange Multiplier method and Penalty method are used to define the pulley element, as described in this paper. Both approaches are easy to implement in general FEM codes.

Keywords

• Pulley
• finite element method
• Penalty stiffness
• Lagrange multiplier