A wave-based substructuring approach for fast modification predictions and industrial vehicle optimization

Abstract

In the vehicle development process, design decisions are increasingly based on virtual prototypes (for example using Finite Element (FE) models), as time-to-market must be reduced, while more and more variants must be designed and assessed. Substructuring and Component Mode Synthesis (CMS) methods are useful to speed up the time of local design modifications. Traditional CMS methods involve coupling the system matrices of each substructure along all interface degrees of freedom (DOFs). A Wave-Based Substructuring (WBS) approach has been developed, that aims to find a set of basis functions that describe the dynamic behavior of the coupling interfaces. The interface displacements in the assembled system are then written as a linear combination of these basis functions. As the number of basis functions is typically much lower than the number of interface DOFs, the procedure reduces the number of variables in the matrix equations and the size of the interface description. This greatly facilitates the model reduction procedure and results in faster structural and vibro-acoustic predictions. The WBS approach has been implemented in an integrated multi-attribute virtual simulation environment, where it complements the assembly definition and trimming functionality as it allows speeding up modification predictions and thus alleviates the computational burden of industrial vehicle optimization. This is demonstrated on the basis of three test cases taken from automotive industry. 1