A formal procedure and invariants of a transition from conventional finite elements to the absolute nodal coordinate formulation

摘要

In this paper, finite elements based on the absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) are studied. The formulation has been developed by various authors for the dynamical simulation of large-displacement and large-rotation problems in flexible multibody dynamics. This study introduces a procedure to track the general geometrical properties of ANCF elements back to their prototypes in the conventional finite-element method (FEM), which deals with small-displacement problems. In this study, it is shown that each known ANCF element can be derived from a conventional FEM using a universal transform. Moreover, some important static and dynamic properties of the elements in small-displacement problems are automatically preserved. In the past, the authors of each newly proposed ANCF element have made unnecessary efforts to show the consistency of the above mentioned properties.