Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea ISSN:1229-3059(Print) 2287-2302(Online) 한국전산구조공학회 논문집

The structures, which are made up with the huge number of degrees-of-freedom and the assembly of substructures, have a great complexity. In order to increase the computational efficiency, the analysis models have to be simplified. Many substructuring techniques have been developed to simplify large-scale engineering problems. The techniques are very powerful for solving nonlinear problems which require many iterative calculations. In this paper, a modal derivatives-based model order reduction method, which is able to capture the stretching-bending coupling behavior in geometrically nonlinear systems, is adopted and investigated for its performance evaluation. The quadratic terms in nonlinear beam theory, such as Green-Lagrange strains, can be explained by the modal derivatives. They can be obtained by taking the modal directional derivatives of eigenmodes and form the second order terms of modal reduction basis. The method proposed is then applied to a co-rotational finite element formulation that is well-suited for geometrically nonlinear problems. Numerical results reveal that the end-shortening effect is very important, in which a conventional modal reduction method does not work unless the full model is used. It is demonstrated that the modal derivative approach yields the best compromised result and is very promising for substructuring large-scale geometrically nonlinear problems.