Stabilized Solution to Spurious Mode Problem and Ill-Conditioning in Interface Force Based Substructure Coupling Method

Abstract

There are two major types of substructure mode synthesis methods, i.e., the fixed-interface component mode synthesis and free-interface component mode synthesis. There are two coupling methods, the interface degrees of freedom based coupling method and the interface force based coupling method, the former one is referred to as the primary assembly method, and the latter is referred to as the dual assembly method. However, the dual assembly method is theoretically shown to be unstable in this research, such reduced stiffness matrix is indefinite, this fatal weakness can be conquered by further interface reduction, and the interface compatibility is therefore rigorously enforced. Unfortunately, Craig’s method leads to another numerical instability when inverting a submatrix of residual flexibility on the interface degrees of freedom, this problem is neglectable in small dimensional matrix problems, but it is prominent in large models when the number of interface degrees of freedom is large, this ill-conditioning problem may be circumvented by truncated singular value decomposition technique; here, a more efficient strategy is proposed, the substructure reduction is modified, this modification proves to be numerically stable, and it can be even more accurate than the prevailing Craig-Bampton method; the numerical examples validate the suggestion.