A smoothed Hermite radial point interpolation method for thin plate analysis

Abstract

A smoothed Hermite radial point interpolation method using gradient smoothing operation is formulated for thin plate analysis. The radial basis functions augmented with polynomial basis are used to construct the shape functions that have the important Delta function property. The smoothed Galerkin weakform is adopted to discretize the governing partial differential equations, and a curvature smoothed operation is developed to relax the continuity requirement and achieve accurate bending solutions. The approximation based on both deflection and rotation variables make the proposed method very effective in enforcing the essential boundary conditions. The effects of different numbers of sub-smoothing-domains created based on the triangular background cell are investigated in detail. A number of numerical examples have been studied and the results show that the present method is very stable and accurate even for extremely irregular background cells.