Absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) is a nonincremental nonlinear finite element procedure that has been successfully applied to the large deformation analysis of multibody systems for more than two decades. Although a comprehensive review on ANCF was conducted by Gerstmayr et al. (2013, “Review on the Absolute Nodal Coordinate Formulation for Large Deformation Analysis of Multibody Systems,” J. Comput. Nonlinear Dyn., 8(3), p. 031016), significant theoretical developments have been made since then at a much faster pace to improve the element accuracy and computational efficiency. In order to overview recent advances in ANCF simulation capabilities that are not covered in the first review paper, this paper aims to conduct a comprehensive review of 259 papers concerning ANCF published from 2012 to 2020. It is shown that the ANCF element library has grown substantially for beam, plate/shell, solid elements, eliminating drawbacks of ANCF elements developed earlier. The application areas have extended, especially in the aerospace field, and the enhanced ANCF simulation capabilities have been demonstrated in solving challenging engineering problems. Research efforts have been made continually to integrate computer-aided design (CAD) and analysis with ANCF elements. Furthermore, computational improvements and multiphysics simulations have become major research topics for ANCF. It is also demonstrated that the accurate ANCF geometry description can be exploited to facilitate structural optimization of multibody systems.

Aircraft performance can be improved using morphing wing technologies, in which the wing can be deployed and folded under flight conditions, providing a wide flight envelope, good fuel efficiency, and reducing the space required to store the aircraft. Because the deployment of the wing is a nonlinear-coupled motion comprising large rigid body motion and large elastic deformation, a nonlinear folding-wing model is required to perform the necessary time-domain deployment simulation, while a linear model is required to perform the frequency-domain flutter analysis. The objective of this paper is to propose a versatile model that can be applied to both the time-domain and frequency-domain analyses of a folding wing, based on flexible multibody dynamics (MBD) using absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) and unsteady aerodynamics. This new versatile model expands the application range of the flexible MBD using ANCF in time-domain simulation, allowing it to express the coupled motion of extremely large elastic deformations and large rigid body motions that arise in next-generation aircraft. The time-domain deployment simulation conducted using the proposed model is useful for parametric deployment-system design because the model has improved calculation time. In the frequency-domain flutter analysis of a folding wing, the flutter speed obtained from the proposed model agrees with that obtained from an experiment, with an error of 4.0%, showing promise for application in next-generation aircraft design.

Geometrically nonlinear strain-based beam formulation has the potential to analyze flexible slender components in multibody systems efficiently owing to the minimum number of variables and constant...

A nonlinear aeroelastic analysis framework for high-aspect-ratio wings that includes the aerodynamic effects of propellers is described. The high computational cost required for modeling aerodynami...

This study aims to increase the amount of electrical energy harvested from a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester under unloaded and high-load resistance conditions. Although increased piezoelectric charge due to the synchronized switch harvesting on inductor (SSHI) strategy damps mechanical vibrations, the mechanical vibration amplitude of a mechanical element in a harvester is assumed to be constant for most discussions regarding the active harvester with SSHI strategy. However, this assumption is not valid under excessive switching actions, in which case the performance of the harvester deteriorates. This problem is known as the vibration suppression effect. To address this problem, in this study, two switching strategies for the charge inversion circuit—namely, switching considering vibration suppression-threshold (SCVS-t) and adaptive SCVS-t (ASCVS-t)—are proposed through intermittent switching actions. During the harvesting process, intermittent switching using these strategies is performed based on the output voltage threshold, thus maintaining high mechanical vibration amplitude and excellent harvesting performance by avoiding excess switching. The ASCVS-t adopts a tuning algorithm for the time-varying threshold and can achieve appropriate intermittent switching and effective harvesting under various vibration conditions without pre-tuning. Experimental comparisons with conventional strategies confirm that the proposed strategies achieve 2.9 times and 2.0 times greater harvested energy storages than a standard harvester and conventional switching strategy, respectively.