Specialisation: Engineering Mechanics

In the field of computational physics and engineering, the introduction of computers opened a world of possibilities. The finite element (FE) method was developed in order to solve complex problems numerically. Over time, the method matured and structures in the field of engineering became more and more complex, resulting in large degree of freedom (DOF) systems. Finite element analyses on large systems can be a computationally heavy and expensive task, which led to the development of Component Mode Synthesis (CMS) techniques. These techniques generally consist of a combination of two other techniques: substructuring and Model Order Reduction (MOR). Substructuring is used to obtain the structural behaviour of large and/or complex structures by dividing them into several smaller and simpler substructures of which the structural behaviour is easier to determine. The global system is then obtained by assembly of the substructures. Using MOR, a full order model is approximated by a system of lower dimension by expressing the displacement field in terms of a set of reduced coordinates. In linear statics and dynamics problems, MOR is widely used. For nonlinear problems however, the same methods cannot be used