Open Access

ARTICLE

A Meshless Numerical Method for Kirchhoff Plates under Arbitrary Loadings

Chia-Cheng Tsai ¹

1 Department of Marine Environmental Engineering, National Kaohsiung Marine University, Kaohsiung City 811, Taiwan, E-mail: tsaichiacheng@mail.nkmu.edu.tw

Computers, Materials & Continua 2011, 22(3), 197-218. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmc.2011.022.197

Abstract

This paper describes the combination of the method of fundamental solutions (MFS) and the dual reciprocity method (DRM) as a meshless numerical method to solve problems of Kirchhoff plates under arbitrary loadings. In the solution procedure, a arbitrary distributed loading is first approximated by either the multiquadrics (MQ) or the augmented polyharmonic splines (APS), which are constructed by splines and monomials. The particular solutions of multiquadrics, splines and monomials are all derived analytically and explicitly. Then, the complementary solutions are solved formally by the MFS. Furthermore, the boundary conditions of lateral displacement, slope, normal moment, and effective shear force are all given explicitly for the particular solutions of multiquadrics, splines and polynomials as well as the kernels of MFS. Finally, numerical experiments are carried out to validate these analytical formulas. In these numerical experiments, homogeneous problems are first considered to find the best location of the MFS sources by the way proposed by Tsai, Lin, Young and Atluri (2006). Then the corresponding nonhomogeneous problems are solved by the DRM based on both the MQ and APS. The numerical results demonstrate that the MQ is in general more accurate than the thin plate spline, or the first order APS, but less accurate than the high order APSs. Overall, this paper derives a meshless numerical method for solving problems of Kirchhoff plates under arbitrary loadings with all kinds of boundary conditions by both the MQ and APS.

---

Keywords

---