Model Reduction Techniques for Shock Loaded Equipment Emulators

In a variety of situations, an undesired shock excitation is applied to a master structure that supports shock-sensitive equipment. Often, one wishes to design and test a master structure that transmits the least amount of shock energy to the attached equipment. In scaled testing of new designs, a major task is to design and construct “equipment emulators” – inexpensive mechanical systems which approximately mimic the dynamic behavior of the actual full-scale equipment as seen by the master structure. The method of balanced truncation is presented here as means by which reduced-order equipment emulators with specified error bounds can be designed. The proposed approach uses easily obtainable frequency-domain impedance descriptions of the master structure and actual equipment at the attachment points. The method is illustrated through application to two simple examples.