Plane stress and plate bending coupling in BEM analysis of shallow shells

In this paper the shear deformable shallow shells are analysed by boundary element method. New boundary integral equations are derived utilizing the Betti's reciprocity principle and coupling boundary element formulation of shear deformable plate and two-dimensional plane stress elasticity. Two techniques, direct integral method (DIM) and dual reciprocity method (DRM), are developed to transform domain integrals to boundary integrals. The force term is approximated by a set of radial basis functions. Several examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the two methods. The accuracy of results obtained by using boundary element method are compared with exact solutions and the finite element method. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.