Structure-preserving model reduction for mechanical systems

This paper focuses on methods of constructing of reduced-order models of mechanical systems which preserve the Lagrangian structure of the original system. These methods may be used in combination with standard spatial decomposition methods, such as the Karhunen–Loève expansion, balancing, and wavelet decompositions. The model reduction procedure is implemented for three-dimensional finite-element models of elasticity, and we show that using the standard Newmark implicit integrator, significant savings are obtained in the computational costs of simulation. In particular simulation of the reduced model scales linearly in the number of degrees of freedom, and parallelizes well.