Abstract. One of the main obstacles to including transient dynamic effects into the performance functions of a structural optimization for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is the high computational cost of each time-dependent response simulation. This paper focuses on the application of model order reduction techniques to optimal design so as to reduce the transient analysis time for the optimization process. To do this, our open-source software mor4ansys performs model order reductions via the block Arnoldi algorithm directly to ANSYS finite element models. We adopt a micro accelerometer as an example to demonstrate the advantages of this approach. The harmonic and transient results of a reduced-order model of the accelerometer yield very good agreement with that from the original high-dimensional ANSYS model. The use of reduced-order models within the optimization iterations produces almost the same results as those without model order reduction, and speeds up the total computation by at least an order of magnitude.

Print publication: Issue 4 (April 2005)
Received 20 July 2004, in final form 4 January 2005
Published 11 March 2005