Analysis of 2-D thin structures by the meshless regular hybrid boundary node method

Thin structures are generally solved by the Finite Element Method (FEM), using plate or shell finite elements which have many limitations in applications, such as numerical locking, edge effects, length scaling and the envergence problem. Recently, by proposing a new approach to treating the nearly-singular integrals, Liu et al. developed a BEM to successfully solve thin structures with the thickness-to-length ratios in the micro- or nano-scales. On the other hand, the meshless Regular Hybrid Boundary Node Method (RHBNM), which is proposed by the current authors and based on a modified functional and the Moving Least-Square (MLS) approximation, has very promising applications for engineering problems owing to its meshless nature and dimension-reduction advantage, and not involving any singular or nearly-singular integrals. Test examples show that the RHBNM can also be applied readily to thin structures with high accuracy without any modification.