Differential quadrature element method for static analysis of Reissner–Mindlin polar plates

Abstract

In this paper, a new numerical technique, the differential quadrature element method (DQEM) , has been developed for static analysis of the two-dimensional polar Reissner–Mindlin plate in the polar coordinate system by integrating the domain decomposition method (DDM) with the differential quadrature method (DQM) . The detailed formulations for the sectorial DQEM plate bending element and the compatibility conditions between each element are presented. The convergence properties and the accuracy of the DQEM for bending of thick polar plates are investigated through a number of numerical computations. Consequently, the DQEM has been successfully applied to analyze several annular sector plates with discontinuous loading and boundary conditions and cutouts to illustrate the simplicity and flexibility of this method for solving Reissner–Mindlin plates in polar coordinate system which are not solvable directly using the differential quadrature method. The numerical results are verified by the existing exact solutions or the FEM solutions obtained using the software package ANSYS (Version 5.3) .