Incorporating Uncertainty in the Physical Substructure During Hybrid Substructuring

Abstract

In hybrid substructuring, a structural system is partitioned into a numerical substructure and a physical substructure. Typically, the physical substructure consists of a system component whose behavior is difficult to model while the numerical substructure consists of a computational model of the remainder of the system. Hybrid substructuring has previously been shown to be an effective method to quantify the effect of parametric uncertainties in the numerical substructure on the response of the system. This paper proposes and implements a methodology where the effect of parametric uncertainty can also be incorporated into the physical substructure. This idea is implemented in a series of small-scale Real-Time Hybrid Substructuring (RTHS) tests on a magneto-rheological fluid damper used to control a two degree-of-freedom mass-spring system. The physical current supplied to the damper is treated as a random variable. Using the RTHS test results, a metamodel of the system’s frequency domain behavior is developed using Principal Component Analysis and Kriging. This metamodel is then used to evaluate probabilistic system performance.