A normal modes technique to reduce the order of poroelastic models: application to 2D and coupled 3D models

A reduced-order model for structures involving poroelastic materials is proposed in this paper. The approach is based on a separation of the solid and fluid phases of the porous material into separate substructures. For each individual substructure, a decoupled normal mode basis is considered, from which a set of vectors for the decomposition is selected. The preserved modes are completed by an additional family to correct for the influence of the static response of the non-preserved. It is shown that the only neglected phenomenons in the model are the inertia of the non-preserved modes and part of their intercoupling. The following three features render the proposed scheme computationally attractive: (i) real valued matrices are involved in the transformations; (ii) the assembly of complex, frequency dependent matrices is only performed at the stage of solving for a particular frequency; and (iii) the number of normal modes required are selected using a novel method.The computational efficacy is demonstrated, on a simple but realistic 3D case, through numerical results obtained using a reduced number of DOFs, showing a significant reduction of computational cost compared with traditional methods. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.