Dynamic Response of a Beam Structure Excited by Sequentially Moving Rigid Bodies

Abstract

A coupled dynamic system consisting of a supporting beam structure and multiple passing rigid bodies is seen in various engineering applications. The dynamic response of such a coupled system is quite different from that of the beam structure subject to moving loads or moving oscillators. The dynamic interactions between the beam and moving rigid bodies are complicated, mainly because of the time-varying number and locations of contact points between the beam and bodies. Due to lack of an efficient modeling and solution technique, previous studies on these coupled systems have been limited to a beam carrying one or a few moving rigid bodies. As such, dynamic interactions between a supporting structure and arbitrarily many moving rigid bodies have not been well investigated, and parametric resonance induced by a sequence of moving rigid bodies, which has important engineering implications, is missed. In this paper, a new semi-analytical method for modeling and analysis of the above-mentioned coupled systems is developed. The method is based on an extended solution domain, by which the number of degrees of freedom of a coupled system is fixed regardless of the number of contact points between the beam and moving rigid bodies at any given time. This feature allows simple and concise description of flexible–rigid body interactions in modeling, and easy and effective implementation of numerical algorithms in solution. The proposed method provides a useful platform for thorough study of flexible–rigid body interactions and parametric resonance for coupled beam–moving rigid body systems. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method in computation is demonstrated in several examples.