Abstract
A method of approximating the controllability gramian, observability gramian and the balancing transformation for lightly damped mechanical systems is presented, the approximation uses the special structure of the system and the fact that the damping is small to reduce the amount of computation considerably. Furthermore, one can avoid the calculation of the entire balancing transformation matrix and calculate only the parts that are required for order reduction. In cases where the reduced order is much smaller than the original that leads to another substantial reduction of computation effort.