Conventional approaches suffer from the drawback of flexible deformation being represented in a body-fixed local frame. An efficient evaluation of the surface deformation of the bodies involved is a vital ingredient for the coupling. A reduced-order basis is employed to describe small flexible deformation of a structural component relative to its large rigid body motion that is represented by a body-fixed frame. The proposed method relies on the coupling of modally reduced flexible multibody systems with fluids represented by the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method. Owed to the multiple scales involved, the inherent complexity of coupled fluid and structural dynamics requires advanced numerical methods for the computational analysis. From wind turbines to capillary blood flow, problems of fluid–structure interaction occur across different scales of length and time.