MODAL SYNTHESIS - A SUBSTRUCTURING METHOD FOR LINEAR THERMAL-SYSTEMS MODELING

This paper presents a new modal method for the modelling of complex thermal systems. This technique is based on the structural modularity of such systems. Thus, a substructuring approach is used to build a reduced modal model. First, we detail a dynamic substructuring method (also called modal synthesis). It aims to compute the eigenelements of the heat operator defined in the global system. In order to obtain these eigenelements we have developed a conforming least-square Galerkin method which controls the flux continuity on the interfaces between adjacent substructures. Then we present a static substructuring method to compute the pseudo-static term of the global solution. Finally, an example shows the relevance of the above approach. The methods described in this article assume a perfect thermal contact between components and a kind of symmetry in the complex thermal splitting. These restrictions of technical nature will be relaxed in a forthcoming paper.