Abstract
The authors apply the transfer influence coefficient method to the 3. dimensional vibration analysis of beam with multi - joints and formulate a general algorithm to analyse the longitudinal, flexural and torsional coupled forced vibration. In this paper, a structure which is mainly found in the robot arms, cranes and so on, has some crooked parts, subsystems and joints, but has no closed loop in this system. It is modeled as the beam of a distributed mass system with massless translational, rotational and torsional springs in each node, and joint elements of release or roll at node which the displacement vector is discontinuous. The superiority of the present method to the transfer matrix method in the computation accuracy was confirmed from the numerical computation results. Moreover, we confirmed that boundary and intermediate conditions could be controlled by varying the values of the spring constants.