Modeling intermittent contact for flexible multibody systems

This paper consists of two parts. The first part presents a complementarity based recursive scheme to model intermittent contact for flexible multibody systems. A recursive divide-and-conquer framework is used to explicitly impose the bilateral constraints in the entire system. The presented approach is an extension of the hybrid scheme for rigid multibody systems to allow for small deformations in form of local mode shapes. The normal contact and frictional complementarity conditions are formulated at position and velocity level, respectively, for each body in the system. The recursive scheme preserves the essential characteristics of the contact model and formulates a minimal size linear complementarity problem at logarithmic cost for parallel implementation.