We consider model order reduction of a cable-mass system modeled by a one dimensional wave equation with interior damping and dynamic boundary conditions. The system is driven by a time dependent forcing input to a linear mass-spring system at the left boundary of the cable. A mass-spring model at the right end of the cable includes a nonlinear stiffening force. The goal of the model reduction is to produce a low order model that produces an accurate approximation to the displacement and velocity of the mass in the nonlinear mass-spring system at the right boundary. We believe the nonlinear cable-mass model considered here has not been explored elsewhere; therefore, we prove the well-posedness and exponential stability of the unforced linear and nonlinear models under certain conditions on the damping parameters, and then consider a balanced truncation method to generate the reduced order model (ROM) of the nonlinear input-output system. Little is understood about model reduction of nonlinear input-output systems. Therefore, we present detailed numerical experiments concerning the performance of the nonlinear ROM; we find that the ROM is accurate for many different combinations of model parameters. We also prove the well-posedness and exponential stability of other cable-mass problems with unbounded input and output operators, and numerically investigate the behavior of the ROMs for these system
