Computational Aspects of Nonlinear Structural Systems With Large Rigid Body Motion

Major developments achieved in the fields dealing with computational methods for the analysis of nonlinear structures experiencing large rigid body motion and with flexible multibody systems with nonlinear deformations are finding their way into the commercial general-purpose software in both finite elements and multibody dynamics packages, providing powerful numerical tools for complex industrial applications. Unfortunately, the efforts of scientific communities, such as those dealing with finite elements, multibody dynamics and numerical analysis, do not have the desired interaction. Consequently, major findings in each of the scientific areas are slow to reach other communities preventing that the scientific progress that can be achieved in areas of common interest reaches its full potential. This book, which is an outgrowth of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop that brought together the leading scientists, aims fill such gap by assessing the current state-of-art and providing specific results from the different schools of thought with a focus on the trends for future research.