Simulation of Shear Deformable Plates using Meshless Maximum Entropy Basis Functions

First-order Shear Deformable Plate Theory (FSDT) is widely used throughout engineering practice to simulate structures with planar dimensions much larger than their thickness. Meshless methods have seen use in the literature as a method for discretising the FSDT equations and hold numerous advantages over traditional mesh based techniques. A recent advance in the area of meshless methods are Maximum Entropy approximants (MaxEnt). MaxEnt combines many properties of various prior meshless approximants such as a weak Kronecker-delta property, seamless blending with Delaunay triangulations, high continuity, and convexity.

In this work MaxEnt along with other meshless approximants have been implemented in a hybrid object-oriented Python/C++/Fortran computer simulation for the simulation of static deflection, free vibration and linear buckling of FSDT plates. The relative performance and ease of implementation of each of the methods will be discussed. The causes of shear locking along with the merits of various alleviation techniques will be covered, including matching fields method, mixed-variational formulations and construction of higher order polynomial basis via both intrinsic and extrinsic (partition of unity) methods. Convergence results show that MaxEnt provides in most cases similar and in some cases superior behaviour to MLS and RPIM approximants when used to discretise the FSDT equations.