Status and Integrated Road-Map for Joints Modeling Research

The constitutive behavior of mechanical joints is largely responsible for the energy dissipation and vibration damping in weapons systems. For reasons arising from the dramatically different length scales associated with those dissipative mechanisms and the length scales characteristic of the overall structure, this physics cannot be captured adequately through direct simulation of the contact mechanics within a structural dynamics analysis. The only practical method for accommodating the nonlinear nature of joint mechanisms within structural dynamic analysis is through constitutive models employing degrees of freedom natural to the scale of structural dynamics. This document discusses a road-map for developing such constitutive models