Elastic bending analysis of folded plates and plate structures using the meshfree Galerkin method

A meshfree Galerkin method that is based on the first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) is introduced to investigate the elastic bending behaviors of stiffened and un-stiffened folded plates under different loadings and boundary conditions. Folded plates are regarded as assemblies of flat plates that lie in different planes. The stiffness matrices of the flat plates are given by the meshfree Galerkin method. Employing the element concept, which is borrowed from the finite element method. and treating every flat plate as a super element, the global stiffness matrix of the entire folded plate is obtained by superposing the stiffness matrices of the flat plates. This is about the same for the analysis of stiffened folded plates. They are considered as assemblies of stiffened flat plates. The stiffness matrices of the stiffened plates are also given by the meshfree method. Unlike the finite element methods, no mesh is required in determining the stiffness matrices for the flat plates and the stiffened plates in this paper, which means time-consuming remeshing is entirely avoided for problems such as stiffener position changes of stiffened folded plates. To demonstrate the. accuracy and convergence of the method, several numerical examples are calculated by it and the finite element commercial software ANSYS, Good agreement is observed between the two sets of results.