Substructuring including interface reduction for the efficient vibro-acoustic simulation of fluid-filled piping systems

The operation of pumps and valves leads to strong acoustic excitation in fluid-filled piping systems. Efficient substructuring and model order reduction strategies are required for the sound prediction in piping systems, and in order to reduce the sound transmission to attached components, such as the floor panel in vehicles, for example. This research presents a finite element based automatic substructuring and component mode synthesis technique, which is a combination of an extended Craig–Bampton method for fluid–structure coupled piping systems and a novel, consecutive interface reduction. Hereby, the remaining interface degrees of freedom between different substructures are further reduced using appropriate Ritz vectors. The proposed model order reduction strategy accelerates the computation of transfer functions in fluid-filled extended piping systems. In order to validate the simulation results, experimental results are obtained by a hydraulic test bench for dynamic measurements, where fluid pulsation is induced by piezo-driven transducers. The observed fluid–structure interaction phenomena correspond to the predictions by the proposed computation approach.