Modeling and simulation of elastoplastic multibody systems with damage

Abstract Flexible multibody systems are studied where plasticity is induced by inertial forces. Such a situation may occur when the stiffness of a structure is weakened by an operation under catastrophic environmental conditions. To analyze this phenomenon, plane motions of beam elements with large rigid-body motion and moderately large deformation are considered. The equations of motions for the problem are derived by Hamilton's principle extended to nonconservative systems. Stiffening terms are included via the second order theory of structures. The elastic part of the multibody system generates differential algebraic equations (DAE). Implicit Runge Kutta schemes are used to transform the DAEs into a nonlinear system of equations that have to be solved for every time-step. The nonlinear part of strain is solved by a fixed-point iteration, where the nonlinear system of equations is solved in every step of the iteration. The high efficiency of this method is due to the fact that the fixed-point iteration ...