A meshless method of a thin plate

A meshless approach to analysis of arbitrary Kirchhoff plates by the local boundary integral equation(LBIE) method is presented. The method combines the advantageous features of, all the three methods: the Galerkin finite element method (GFEM), the boundary element method (BEM) and the element-free Galerkin method (EFGM). It is a truly meshless method, which means that the discretization is independent of geometric subdivision into elements or cells, but is only based on a set of nodes (ordered or scattered) over a domain in question. It involves only boundary integration, however, over a local boundary centered at the node in question; It poses no difficulties in satisfying the essential boundary conditions while leading to banded and sparse system matrices using the moving least square (MLS) approximations. It is shown that high accuracy can be achieved for arbitrary geometries for clamped and simply-supported edge conditions. The method is found to be simple, efficient, and attractive. Project supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 19972019).