Composite rigid body formalism for flexible multibody systems

The paper describes the extension of the composite rigid body formalism for the flexible multibody systems. The extension has been done in such a way that all advantages of the formalism with respect to the coordinates of large motion of rigid bodies are extended to the flexible degrees of freedom, e.g. the same recursive treatment of both coordinates and no appearance of O(n ³) computational complexity terms due to the flexibility. This extension has been derived for both open loop and closed loop systems of flexible bodies. The comparison of the computational complexity of this formalism with other known approaches has shown that the described formalism of composite rigid body and the residual algorithm based on it are more efficient formalisms for small number of bodies in the chains and deformation modes than the usual recursive formalism of articulated body inertia.