Unilateral frictional contact between a rigid wheel traversing on a flexible beam: An analytical investigation

Abstract

This paper proposes a non-linear dynamic solver to simulate the dynamics of a rigid wheel traversing over a flexible beam involving a unilateral contact at the interface. Euler’s discretization scheme is extended incorporating Linear Complementary approach to perform explicit integration over time domain. The proposed solver is analytically designed to incorporate frictional force acting at the wheel-beam interface along with the possibility of generation of normal gap between the two bodies. Moreover, rotation of the wheel is also appended in the proposed algorithm and change in contact point between the wheel and beam is evaluated at every time step. After validation with existing literature, the solver is applied to study various dynamic responses of wheel and beam. Further, the technique is applied to moving oscillator model traversing over a flexible beam. The effect of initial wheel velocity, coefficient of friction, frequency of the oscillator on overall dynamic response of beam and wheel have been thoroughly investigated. The proposed algorithm delivers an exact solution based on the system’s fundamental mechanics, thus reducing the mesh reliance which amounts to high computational cost in finite element solver. The suggested method provides a broad future potential for solving rigid-flexible contact multibody dynamic problems.