Meshless Local Petrov-Galerkin (MLPG) formulation for analysis of thick plates

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 assumed. Discretization in the in-plane directions is performed by means of the moving least squares approximation. The linear interpolation over the thickness is used for the in-plane displacements, while the hierarchical quadratic interpolation is adopted for the transversal displacement in order to avoid the thickness locking effect. The numerical efficiency of the proposed meshless formulation is illustrated by the numerical examples.