Dynamic analysis of cable-driven flexible multibody systems and its experimental verification

This paper presents a method to handle a cable element in the flexible multibody dynamics simulation. The formulation for the cable element successfully separates the material and geometric stiffness matrices irrespective to the choice of rotational parameter. The proposed formulation has been implemented in the previously developed flexible multibody dynamics computer program. An experiment on a simple deployable truss structure whose deployment is controlled by a cable reveals that the proposed method can yield results that are accurate enough for industrial applications.