Modeling the Damped Dynamic Behavior of a Flexible Pendulum

The focus of this work is on the computational modeling of a pendulum made of a hyperelastic material and the corresponding experimental validation with the aim of contributing to the study of a material commonly used in seismic absorber devices. From the proposed dynamics experiment, the motion of the pendulum is recorded using a high-speed camera. The evolution of the pendulum’s positions is recovered using a capturing motion technique by tracking markers. The simulation of the problem is developed in the framework of a parallel multi-physics code. Particular emphasis is placed on the analysis of the Newmark integration scheme and the use of Rayleigh damping model. In particular, the time step size effect is analyzed. A strong time step size dependency is obtained for dissipative time integration schemes, while the Rayleigh damping formulation without time integration dissipation shows time step–independent results when convergence is achieved. © IMechE 2019.