Dynamic transient analysis of systems with material nonlinearity: a model order reduction approach

Model Order Reduction (MOR) denotes the theory by which one tries to catch a model of order lower than that of the real model. This is conveniently pursued in view of the design of an efficient structural control scheme, just passive within this paper. When the nonlinear response of the reference structural system affects the nature of the reduced model, making it dependent on the visited subset of the input-output space, standard MOR techniques do not apply. The mathematical theory offers some specific alternatives, which however involve a degree of sophistication unjustified in the presence of a few localized nonlinearities. This paper suggests applying standard MOR to the linear parts of the structural system, the interface remaining the original unreduced nonlinear components. A case study focused on the effects of a helicopter land crash is used to exemplify the proposal.