Contact model between superelements in dynamic multibody systems

In this paper, a new contact formulation defined between flexible bodies modeled as superelements is investigated. Unlike rigid contact models, this approach enables to study the deformation and vibration phenomena induced by hard contacts. Compared with full-scale finite element models of flexible bodies, the proposed method is computationally more efficient, especially in case of a large number of bodies and contact conditions. The compliance of each body is described using a reduced-order elastic model which is defined in a corotational frame that follows the gross motion of the body. The basis used to reduce the initial finite element model relies on the Craig-Bampton method which uses both static boundary modes and internal vibration modes. The formulation of the contact condition couples all degrees of freedom of the reduced model in a nonlinear way. The relevance of the approach is demonstrated by simulation results first on a simple example, and then on a gear pair model.