A Corotational Formulation for the Simulation of Flexible Mechanisms

A corotational formulation is developed for the extension of infinitesimal stiffness and mass matrices to large rotations. The resulting formulation is applied and certified for a variety of test cases. One aspect which distinguishes the formulation is that not only the corotational residual was developed, but the consistent tangent matrix as well. This fact accelerates the convergence rate of the nonlinear Newmark iterations and guarantees the convergence of the line search algorithm. The consistent tangent matrix also opens the possibility for using the formulation for the study of structural stability as well.