One of the big advantages of the Multibody Dynamics Module is the ease by which you can mix rigid and flexible parts. Usually, all or the majority of the parts in a multibody simulation are rigid and are thus represented by only the degrees of freedom of a rigid body. The material model for a rigid part is Rigid Material.

Sometimes, however, you may want to include the flexibility of one or several domains. To do that, use a Linear Elastic Material. This is the default material model in the Multibody Dynamics interface, so the workflow is to add as many Rigid Material nodes as needed and assign domains to them. The remaining domains will then be linear elastic and thus flexible. By adding a Solid Mechanics interface, you can get access to many other material models for the flexible domains.

Linear flexible components can be reduced to computationally efficient low order models, using the Component Mode Synthesis (CMS) technique. Such reduced models are defined by adding a Reduced Flexible Components node, and can be used in dynamic, as well as stationary analysis.