On the feasibility of dynamic substructuring for hybrid testing of vibrating structures

Dynamically substructured systems (DSS) are a typical technique to achieve real-time numerical simulations combined with physically tested components. However, the rigorous feasibility analysis before the implementation is missing. This paper is aimed to fill this gap by establishing rigorous conditions for when DSS is suitable for dynamic testing. The proposed method is based on novel symbolic recursive formulations for the transfer functions describing a generic lumped parameter vibrating structure, enabling the analysis of structural and other properties without requiring the computation of explicit symbolic expressions for the transfer functions involved, representing a significant breakthrough as it allows to perform feasibility analysis in analytical form, rather than solely relying on numerical approaches. The series of analytical conclusions presented in this paper, and future ones unlocked by the proposed approach, will significantly enrich the research in the community of DSS and structural vibrations. In particular, the proposed approach allows performing analysis of causality, controllability and observability using much reduced knowledge of the structure, thus significantly simplifying such analysis. Analytical conclusions on stability can also be made with the help of novel recursive form, removing the need of repeatedly calculating the roots of characteristic equations, a task that can be performed only via numerical approaches and for which analytical results are not available. The proposed methodology can be applied to a whole class of vibration problems and is not linked to any specific structure, going beyond the specific examples available in the literature.