Model order reduction for temperature-dependent nonlinear mechanical systems

Abstract

The thermal dynamics in thermo-mechanical systems exhibits a much slower time scale compared to the structural dynamics. In this work, we use the method of multiple scales to reduce the thermo-mechanical structural models with a slowly-varying temperature distribution in a systematic manner. In the process, we construct a reduction basis that adapts according to the instantaneous temperature distribution of the structure, facilitating an efficient reduction in the number of unknowns. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the method on a range of linear and nonlinear beam examples and obtain a consistently better accuracy and reduction in the number of unknowns than the standard Galerkin projection using a constant basis.