The modelling of flexible elements in mechanical systems has been investigated via several methods issuing from both the field of multi-body dynamics and the area of structural mechanics and vibration theory. As regards the multibody approach, recursive formulations in relative coordinates are quite suitable and efficient for a large variety of applications. Such a formalism is developed here for a general multibody system containing flexible plates and in such a way that its full symbolic generation is possible within the ROBOTRAN program [1].
El Ouatouati, A., Fisette, P., & Johnson, D. (1999). A fully symbolic model of multibody systems containing flexible plates. Nonlinear Dynamics : an international journal of nonlinear dynamics and chaos in engineering systems, 18(4), 357-382. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026439811434 (Original work published 1999)