Meshless Natural Neighbor Galerkin method for the analysis of composite plates using higher order shear deformation theories

In the present work a meshless natural neighbor Galerkin method for the bending and vibration analysis of plates and laminates is presented. The method has distinct advantages of geometric flexibility of meshless method. The compact support and the connectivity between the nodes forming the compact support are performed dynamically at the run time using the natural neighbor concept. By this method the nodal connectivity is imposed through nodal sets with reduced size, reducing significantly the computational effort in construction of the shape functions. Smooth non-polynomial type interpolation functions are used for the approximation of inplane and out of plane primary variables. The use of non-polynomial type interpolants has distinct advantage that the order of interpolation can be easily elevated through a degree elevation algorithm, thereby making them suitable also for higher order shear deformation theories. The evaluation of the integrals is made by use of Gaussian quadrature defined on background integration cells. The plate formulation is based on first order shear deformation plate theory. The application of natural neighbor Galerkin method formulation has been made for the bending and free vibration analysis of plates and laminates. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the present numerical method in calculating deflections, stresses and natural frequencies in comparison to the Finite element method, analytical methods and other meshless methods available in the literature