Improved multi-body contact analysis based on the hyper-reduction approach

The multi-body structural analysis is usually required during the design phase of an aircraft. It usually requires a large computational cost, especially when including numerous degrees of freedom and nonlinearities such as the contact phenomenon. In such background, projection-based reduced-order model (PROM) technique is used to alleviate the computational time while maintaining reasonable accuracy. However, in an explicit analysis, comprised of the vectorized computation, application of a sole PROM will be less effective due to the matrix-vector multiplication for the projection. In this paper, the hyper-reduction approach will be applied to an explicit multi-body analysis. Energy-conserving sampling and weighting method will be employed. It will reduce the computational cost for the internal force vector estimation and matrix-vector multiplication for PROM. Such reduction approach will be applied to multiple solid bodies. The interaction between the solid bodies is considered by the efficient node-to-segment contact algorithm. It is verified that the present approach will reduce the computational cost compared against solving the full-order model (FOM) while maintaining accuracy. The results are expected to be effectively utilized in the aerospace industry, where rapid prediction of the multi-body analysis is desired.