On the relevance of inertia related terms in the equations of motion of a flexible body in the floating frame of reference formulation

The floating frame of reference formulation is an established method for the description of linear elastic bodies within multibody dynamics. An exact derivation leads to rather complex equations of motion. In order to reduce the computational burden, it is common to neglect certain terms. In the literature this is done by strict application of the small deformation assumption to the kinetic energy. This leads to a remarkably simplified set of equations. In this work, the significance of all terms is investigated at the level of the equations of motion. It is shown that for a large number of applications the previously mentioned set of simple equations is sufficient. Furthermore, scenarios are described in which this simple set is no longer accurate enough. Finally, guidelines are provided, so that engineers can decide which terms should be considered or not. The theoretical conclusions drawn in this work are underlined by qualitative numerical investigations.