A direct coupling method of meshless local petrov-galerkin (MLPG) and finite element method (FEM)1

Abstract

A direct coupling method is developed for coupling meshless methods such as the MLPG and FEM. The radial point interpolation method with polynomial terms (RPIMp) which lead to a shape function that indeed obeys the Kronecker delta property are used to approximate the trial functions in the MLPG. This important property make the MLPG method could couple the FEM directly as other coupling method must use additional techniques. An electromagnetic problem governed by the Poisson’s equation and nonlinear ionized field examples are given in this paper. The results, which are compared with both the exact solutions and solutions obtained from the FEM, show that the method in this paper could couple the MLPG FEM directly without any additional numerical techniques. The paper offer an coupling method by making full use of the MLPG and FEM advantages to deal with engineering problems and more difficult problem geometries.