Multibody Simulations with Reduced Order Flexible Bodies obtained by FEA

Tighter specifications in synchrotron instrumentation development force the design engineers more and more often to choose a mechatronics design approach.
This includes actively controlled systems that need to be properly designed.
The new Nano Active Stabilization System (NASS) for the ESRF beamline ID31 was designed with such an approach.

We chose a multi-body design modelling approach for the development of the NASS end-station.
Significance of such models depend strongly on its input and consideration of the right stiffness of the system's components and subsystems.
For that matter, we considered sub-components in the multi-body model as /reduced order flexible bodies/ representing the component's modal behaviour with reduced mass and stiffness matrices obtained from finite element analysis (FEA) models.
These matrices were created from FEA models via modal reduction techniques, more specifically the component mode synthesis (CMS).
This makes this design approach a combined multibody-FEA technique.

We validated the technique with a test bench that confirmed the good modelling capabilities using reduced order flexible body models obtained from FEA for an amplified piezoelectric actuator (APA).