RBF meshless method for large deflection of thin plates with immovable edges

An efficient meshless formulation is presented for large deflection of thin plates with immovable edges. In this method. a fifth-order polynomial radial basis function (RBF) is used to approximate the solution variables. The governing equations are formulated in terms of the three displacement components u, v and w. The solution is obtained by satisfying three coupled partial differential equations and their boundary conditions inside the domain and over the boundary of the plate, respectively. The collocation procedure produces a system of coupled non-linear algebraic equations, which are solved using an incremental-iterative procedure. The numerical efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated through numerical examples. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.