Efficient Vibration Simulation Using Model Order Reduction

Currently most practical vibration and structural problems in automotive suspensions require the use of the finite element method to obtain their structural responses. When the finite element model has a very large number of degrees of freedom, the harmonic and dynamic analyses are computationally too expensive to repeat within a feasible design process time. To alleviate the computational difficulty, this paper presents a moment-matching based model order reduction (MOR) which reduces the number of degrees of freedom of the original finite element model and speeds up the necessary simulations with the reduced-size models. The moment-matching model reduction via the Arnoldi process is performed directly to ANSYS finite element models by software mor4ansys. Among automotive suspension components, a knuckle is taken as an example to demonstrate the advantages of this approach for vibration simulation. The frequency and transient dynamic responses by the MOR are compared with those by the mode superposition method.