Substructuring verification of a rear fuselage mounted twin-engine aircraft

Dynamic substructuring allows for the reduction of large complex structures into substructures to increase computational efficiency and to isolate the local dynamic behaviors of concern. However, errors such as truncation, continuity and rigid body mode errors still limit the applicability of this method experimentally. Additionally, the feasibility of implementing substructuring techniques on finite element models of multi-component fuselage structures has yet to be shown in the literature. The objective of this paper is twofold: first to introduce a feasible substructuring methodology that mitigates the experimental and multi-component limitations with current methods; and secondly, to investigate the modal properties and applicability of substructuring analysis on a rear fuselage mounted twin-engine aircraft. This configuration is not well understood in the literature despite having been shown to have increased interior cabin noise and vibration levels. Experimental validation of the computational model was first performed. A substructuring analysis of the validated computational model produced natural frequencies of the local and global modes that agreed within 6.47% on average, and pseudo-orthogonality terms greater than 0.89 for all modes considered. This methodology proved to be useful for generating an accurate representation of local modes within a global structure for the aircraft configuration studied. This will allow for future work to more thoroughly investigate the local modes using innovative design methods with confidence that the local modes will correlate with the global modes.