A substructuring method for calculation of eigenvalue derivatives and eigenvector derivatives

Abstract

A substructuring method is proposed in the paper to calculate the eigenvalue derivatives and eigenvector derivatives of structures. The advantage of the new technique lies in that only the eigensensitivities of the substructures containing the design parameters of interest are calculated while eigensensitivities of other substructures not. The eigensensitivities of the global structure are assembled by performing some constraints on the eigensensitivities of the substructures at the interface. Consequently this can reduce the computation load significantly especially for model updating in which eigensolutions and eigensensitivities need to be calculated iteratively. Applications to a frame and a practical bridge structure show that the present substructuring approach is more computational efficient than the traditional global method.