ANALYSIS OF MINDLIN–REISSNER PLATES USING CELL-BASED SMOOTHED RADIAL POINT INTERPOLATION METHOD

In this paper, a formulation for the static and free vibration analysis of Mindlin–Reissner plates is proposed using the cell-based smoothed radial point interpolation method (CS-RPIM) with sub-domain smoothing operations. The radial basis functions augmented with polynomial basis are employed to construct the shape functions that have the Delta function property. The generalized smoothed Galerkin (GS-Galerkin) weakform is adopted to discretize the governing differential equations, and the curvature smoothing is performed to relax the continuity requirement and to improve the accuracy and the rate of convergence of the solution. The present CS-RPIM formulation is based on the first-order shear deformation plate theory, with effective treatment for shear-locking and hence is applicable to both thin and relatively thick plates. To verify the accuracy and stability of the present formulation, intensive comparison studies are conducted with existing results available in the literature and good agreements are obtained. The numerical examples confirm that the present method is shear-locking free and very stable and accurate even using extremely distributed nodes.