ANALYSIS OF PLATE BENDING BY THE BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD CONSIDERING PASTERNAK-TYPE FOUNDATION

The Boundary Element Method (BEM) is used in this work to the analysis of plates resting on Pasternak-type foundations, considering Reissners theory. The used approach considers the fundamental solution already employed in the analysis of plates by the BEM. Integral equations that are used to solve the problem are presented, in which domain integrals related to soil reactions are included. The region situated over the foundation is discretized into constant internal cells and the integrals related to the cells are transformed into integrals over the boundary of these cells. Since the soil reactions are also unknowns to the problem and these forces are written in terms of transverse displacements and their derivatives, additional equations written for domain points situated in the cells are considered. In order to define additional equations to the original system, integral equations for transverse displacements at internal points and integral equations for the second derivatives of these transverse displacements are added to the system and these displacements and respective derivatives are also considered as unknowns to the resulting system. Continuous and discontinuous quadratic boundary elements are used in the numerical implementation. Some numerical examples are presented and results are compared with those obtained by other authors with different approaches.