A 'nodeless' dual superelement formulation for structural and multibody dynamics application to reduction of contact problems

A 'nodeless' superelement formulation based on dual-component mode synthesis is proposed, in which the superelement dynamic behavior is described in terms of modal intensities playing the role of intrinsic variables. A computational scheme is proposed to build an orthogonal set of static modes so that the system matrices can have a diagonal or nearly diagonal form, providing thus high computational efficiency for application in the context of structural dynamics as well as flexible multibody dynamics. Connection to adjacent components is expressed through kinematic relationships between intrinsic variables and local dis-placements. The efficiency of the method is demonstrated on a simple example involving multiple unilateral contact. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.