Substructural Coupling

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Substructural Coupling

There are numerous instances where it is convenient to view a complex engineering structure as a collection of simpler components, or substructures. For instance, the theoretical analysis of a large structure can be done more efficiently by breaking it down into its component parts, analyzing each part separately, and then reassembling the entire structure based on the models of each individual component. The increase in efficiency thus gained derives from the facility of describing a (sub)structure’s essential dynamic characteristics very compactly in terms of its modal properties.

Another way of viewing this process is to consider the spatial model of a typical large-scale structure in matrix terms. The mass and stiffness matrices of such a structure would have extensive regions populated by zeroes. In essence, substructure analysis focuses on submatrices centered on the leading diagonals of the complete system matrices, excluding the distant and empty regions.

One of the particularly powerful applications of the substructure coupling approach is to a range of problems that require combining the subsystem or component models derived from different sources – perhaps from quite disparate analyses but often from a mixture of analytical and experimental studies. Thus we may seek to combine component models from theoretical analysis with others from modal tests.

The advantages of this approach may summarized as:

• It enables the combination of substructures from different project groups.
• In modifying a substructure, only the changed portion needs to be measured. This would result in effective localized optimization, rapid design iterations, and ultimately, overall optimization.
• It allows easier spotting of local problems that might not be visible by testing the entire structure