Patent ID: 7386428

Claim:
A method for modeling one or more guided cable contacts in a time-domain simulation of finite element analysis, the method comprising: defining a plurality of material properties and a geometry of a structure including said one or more guided cable contacts, wherein the structure is represented by a plurality of nodes and a plurality of elements; assigning initial displacements, velocities and accelerations of each of the nodes; determining a current solution cycle and a time step; when the current solution cycle is less than termination time, calculating guided cable contact stiffness matrix for said one or more guided cable contacts with following steps: defining a slave node, locating a beam having a first and a second end node, establishing a normal vector between a projection point and the slave node, determining a spring constant used for connecting the slave node and the beam and calculating incremental internal forces using the spring constant, the normal vector, length of the beam, and distance between the first end node and the projection point; calculating internal loads array; and obtaining nodal displacements.