A Directly Coupled Finite Element – Meshless Method with Varying Dilation Parameter

Compliant mechanisms are flexible mechanisms that can transfer input forces or displacements through elastic body deformation. Thus, large deformation of structural analysis is necessary, especially for the topology optimization-based design. The meshless method has more advantages in simulating large deformation structural analysis, but the calculation is more expensive than the finite element method. Thus, a directly coupled method of finite element (FE) method and element-free Galerkin (EFG) method is presented in this study. A smooth cosine weight function is proposed to establish continuous shape functions in the whole design domain. To retain the feature of EFG method, a continuous varying dilation parameter is developed in the coupling domain to connect FE and EFG domains. Several benchmark problems are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Comparing with some other coupling methods, the proposal is quite succinct and tractable, shows higher precision or cost less computation comparing with other methods.