Model reduction for flexible structures

Several conditions for a near-optimal reduction of general dynamic systems are presented focusing on the reduction in balanced and modal coordinates. It is shown that model and balanced reductions give very different results for the flexible structure with closely-spaced natural frequencies. In general, balanced reduction is found to give better results. A robust model reduction technique was developed to study the sensitivity of modeling error to variations in the damping of a structure. New concepts of grammians defined over a finite time and/or a frequency interval are proposed including computational procedures for evaluating them. Application of the model reduction technique to these grammians is considered to lead to a near-optimal reduced model which closely reproduces the full system output in the time and/or frequency interval.