On the projection of a flexible bodies modal coordinates onto another Finite Element model with local modifications

The time integration of a complex multibody system is a time consuming part of the entire evaluation process of a flexible component. A multibody simulation of a flexible crankshaft, for instance, interacting with pistons, con rods, fly wheel, hydrodynamic bearings and further takes several hours of central processing unit (CPU) time and may dominate the entire simulation chain. Small, local changes in the involved finite element (FE) models, for example, another notch radius, normally require a new time integration of the entire multibody system. In this publication, a remarkably simple method is presented, so that the multibody simulation of such a variant can be skipped entirely. Instead, a simple and cheap projection of the original results to the modified FE model is proposed. One simple and one elaborate example demonstrate the extraordinary resulting quality for minor design changes like notch radius variations.