A parametric flexible multibody formulation with an explicit dependency on material properties

Accurate numerical models are pivotal throughout the design and whole operation life cycle of a mechanical system. Ideally, such models should be efficient in terms of both their computational and updating time. These requirements are often contrasting. For flexible multibody models, computational efficiency is commonly achieved by employing Model Order Reduction techniques that do not retain an explicit dependency on parameters, resulting in a loss of efficiency in the update. This work proposes a novel flexible multibody formulation that employs parametric Model Order Reduction to represent the flexible bodies of a mechanism, resulting in a parametric flexible multibody model with an explicit dependency on material properties. Such dependency is also retained in the mass-invariant terms used to compute the configuration-dependent mass matrix. The explicit parametric dependency allows for an efficient updating of the models while maintaining low size and high accuracy. The proposed methodology is numerically validated by comparison with standard non-parametric flexible multibody models by considering isotropic and composite materials, and referring to both open-loop and closed-loop mechanisms, showing wide application ranges and promising results in terms of accuracy.