A Virtual Testing Simulation Environment for the ESA’s Micro Vibrations Measurement System

This paper presents the evaluation of various model reduction techniques as possible candidates for building a virtual testing simulation environment of the ESA’s Micro Vibrations Measurement System (MVMS). The resulting tool would represent a key enabling technology for optimization of the tests to be carried out by the facility for the characterization of potential microvibration sources and environments. The present investigation involves both component mode synthesis and state-space based methods. In particular, an enhanced version of the Craig–Bampton (CB) method with substructuring and a hybrid two-stage approach involving a preliminary CB reduction step followed by a balanced truncation are presented and discussed. The number of dominant vibration modes to be retained in each substructure is determined according to the effective interface mass criterion. The different model reduction methods are compared in terms of performance and computational effort. It is shown that some preferable techniques can be identified for the specific purposes of the virtual testing environment of the MVMS.