Research on the rigid-flexible multibody dynamics of concrete placing boom

•A method is proposed for dynamics modeling of a concrete placing boom.•Four substructures have been divided as the foundation of modular modeling.•The transfer matrix is derived based on a discrete time transfer matrix method.•The efficiency and accuracy have been verified through ADAMS and an experiment.

A method is proposed for rigid-flexible multibody dynamic modeling of concrete placing booms, to improve the calculation efficiency and ensure the accuracy. Concrete placing booms consist of four types of substructures, according to the slender rods and the mechanism features. The transfer matrixes of substructures are derived based on the discrete time transfer matrix method. Then, the manipulator's overall transfer matrix is assembled and used for the numerical calculation. An experiment based on a test rig is performed to validate the proposed method, and a model based on ADAMS (short of MSC.ADAMS) is also established to compare the calculating efficiency of the proposed method.