DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF A FLEXIBLE VEHICLE STRUCTURE WITH NONLINEAR FORCE ELEMENTS USING SUBSTRUCTURE TECHNIQUE

Abstract

The substructuring technique is used to analyze the motion of a flexible vehicle structure with nonlinear force elements. The number of effective degrees of freedom of the combined system model is greatly reduced by synthesizing the individually modeled substructures, using constraints of geometric compatibility at the interfaces. When combining the substructures, recursive-type nonlinear integral equations (NIE) are introduced instead of the conventional nonlinear differential equations (NDE). It is shown that the NIE formulation is computationally more efficient than the NDE formulation in simulating steady-state and transient responses of a flexible vehicle with nonlinear dampers. The NIE formulation is further applied to the nonlinear damping optimization problem, and it is found that this method is efficient for optimization.