ABSTRACT
Currently, multipurpose software packages exploit the ease of use of the computational resources available to create virtual prototyping environments (MSC Software 2015, Dassault Systemes 2015). These packages share common geometric modelling features with more or less
1 INTRODUCTION
Multibody dynamic formulations are the basis for the most efficient computational techniques that deal with large overall motion. Formulations based on nonlinear finite element methods provide powerful and versatile procedures to describe the flexibility of the system components. It is no surprise that many of the most recent formulations on flexible multibody dynamics and on finite element methods with large rotations share common features that are of fundamental importance to the design requirements of advanced mechanical and structural systems and to the real-time simulation of complex systems (Ambrósio & Kleiber 2001).
