Recent Advances in the Absolute Nodal Coordinate Formulation: Literature Review From 2012 to 2020

Abstract Absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) is a nonincremental nonlinear finite element procedure that has been successfully applied to the large deformation analysis of multibody systems for more than two decades. Although a comprehensive review on ANCF was conducted by Gerstmayr et al. (2013, “Review on the Absolute Nodal Coordinate Formulation for Large Deformation Analysis of Multibody Systems,” J. Comput. Nonlinear Dyn., 8(3), p. 031016), significant theoretical developments have been made since then at a much faster pace to improve the element accuracy and computational efficiency. In order to overview recent advances in ANCF simulation capabilities that are not covered in the first review paper, this paper aims to conduct a comprehensive review of 259 papers concerning ANCF published from 2012 to 2020. It is shown that the ANCF element library has grown substantially for beam, plate/shell, solid elements, eliminating drawbacks of ANCF elements developed earlier. The application areas have extended, especially in the aerospace field, and the enhanced ANCF simulation capabilities have been demonstrated in solving challenging engineering problems. Research efforts have been made continually to integrate computer-aided design (CAD) and analysis with ANCF elements. Furthermore, computational improvements and multiphysics simulations have become major research topics for ANCF. It is also demonstrated that the accurate ANCF geometry description can be exploited to facilitate structural optimization of multibody systems.