A new subregion mesh method for the investigation of the elastic-plastic impact in flexible multibody systems

Impact processes between flexible bodies often lead to local stress concentration and wave propagation of high frequency. Therefore, the modeling of flexible multi-body systems involving impact should consider the local plastic deformation and the strict requirements of the spa-tial discretization. Owing to the nonlinearity of the stiffness matrix, the reduction of the element number is extremely important. For the contact-impact problem, since different regions have different requirements regarding the element size, a new subregion mesh method is proposed to reduce the number of the unnecessary elements. A dynamic model for flexible multibody systems with elastic-plastic contact impact is established based on a floating frame of reference formulation and complete Lagrange incremental nonlin-ear finite-element method to investigate the effect of the elastic-plastic deformation as well as spatial discretization. Experiments on the impact between two bodies are carried out to validate the correctness of the elastic-plastic model. The proposed formulation is applied to a slider-crank system with elastic-plastic impact.