Dynamic analysis of deployable structures using independent displacement modes based on Moore-Penrose generalized inverse matrix

Deployable structures have gained more and more applications in space and civil structures, while it takes a large amount of computational resources to analyze this kind of multibody systems using common analysis methods. This paper presents a new approach for dynamic analysis of multibody systems consisting of both rigid bars and arbitrarily shaped rigid bodies. The bars and rigid bodies are connected through their nodes by ideal pin joints, which are usually fundamental components of deployable structures. Utilizing the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse matrix, equations of motion and constraint equations of the bars and rigid bodies are formulated with nodal Cartesian coordinates as unknowns. Based on the constraint equations, the nodal displacements are expressed as linear combination of the independent modes of the rigid body displacements, i.e., the null space orthogonal basis of the constraint matrix. The proposed method has less unknowns and a simple formulation compared with common multibody dynamic methods. An analysis program for the proposed method is developed, and its validity and efficiency are investigated by analyses of several representative numerical examples, where good accuracy and efficiency are demonstrated through comparison with commercial software package ADAMS.