2004a): On the application of the meshless Local Petrov-Galerkin (MLPG) Method to the Analysis of Shear Deformable

Abstract: An efficient meshless formulation based on the Local Petrov-Galerkin approach for the analysis of shear deformable thick plates is presented. Using the kinematics of a three-dimensional continuum, the local symmetric weak form of the equilibrium equations over the cylindrical shaped local sub-domain is derived. The linear test function in the plate thickness direction is as-sumed. Discretization in the in-plane directions is per-formed by means of the moving least squares approx-imation. The linear interpolation over the thickness is used for the in-plane displacements, while the hierarchi-cal quadratic interpolation is adopted for the transversal displacement in order to avoid the thickness locking ef-fect. The numerical efficiency of the proposed meshless formulation is illustrated by the numerical examples