A method for substructural sensitivity synthesis

A new method, termed the substructural sensitivity synthesis method, which utilizes the computational merits of the component mode synthesis technique was proposed for the simple calculation of design sensitivities of the dynamic characteristics of substructurally combined structures. It has been shown that the modal sensitivities of the entire structure can be obtained by synthesizing the substructural modal data and the sensitivities of the modal data for the design variables of the modifiable substructure. For a truss structure, as an example, the sensitivities of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors obtained by the new method were compared with exact solutions in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency.