A new meshless approach for bending analysis of thin plates with arbitrary shapes and boundary conditions

An efficient and meshfree approach is proposed for the bending analysis of thin plates.The approach is based on the choice of a set of interior points,for each of which a basis function can be defined.Plate deflection is then approximated as the linear combination of those basis functions.Unlike traditional meshless methods,present basis functions are defined in the whole domain and satisfy the governing differential equation for plate.Therefore,no domain integration is needed,while the unknown coefficients of deflection expression could be determined through boundary conditions by using a collocation point method.Both efficiency and accuracy of the approach are shown through numerical results of plates with arbitrary shapes and boundary conditions under various loads.