An inertia-capacitance beam substructure formulation based on the bond graph method with application to rotating beams

In this paper, a novel inertia-capacitance (IC) beam substructure formulation based on the IC-field presentation from the bond graph method is developed. The IC beam provides a modular, systematic and graphical approach to beam modeling. These features allow the modeler to focus more on the modeling and less on the mathematics. As such, the IC beam is proposed as an alternative to the many existing types of beam models available in the literature. The IC beam is formulated in the center of mass body fixed coordinate system allowing for easy interfacing in a multibody system setting. This floating frame approach is also computationally cheap. Elastic deformations in the IC beam are assumed to be small and described by modal superposition. The formulation couples rigid body and elastic deformations in a nonlinear fashion. The formulation is also compact and efficient. Detailed derivations for a two-dimensional planar IC beam with bending modes are presented. A modal acceleration method based on the decoupling of bending modes is proposed for use in the IC beam. The rotating beam spin-up maneuver problem is solved. The Karnopp–Margolis method is applied to ensure complete integral causality for an efficient numerical system. Geometric substructuring technique is applied to model large deflections. The IC beam is shown to be capable of solving the rotating beam problem accurately and efficiently.