Exact imposition of essential boundary condition and material interface continuity in Galerkin‐based meshless methods

Abstract

SummaryRepresented by the element free Galerkin method, the meshless methods based on the Galerkin variational procedure have made great progress in both research and application. Nevertheless, their shape functions free of the Kronecker delta property present great troubles in enforcing the essential boundary condition and the material continuity condition. The procedures based on the relaxed variational formulations, such as the Lagrange multiplier‐based methods and the penalty method, strongly depend on the problem in study, the interpolation scheme, or the artificial parameters. Some techniques for this issue developed for a particular method are hard to extend to other meshless methods. Under the framework of partition of unity and strict Galerkin variational formulation, this study, taking Poisson's boundary value problem for instance, proposes a unified way to treat exactly both the material interface and the nonhomogeneous essential boundary as in the finite element analysis, which is fit for any partition of unity‐based meshless methods. The solution of several typical examples suggests that compared with the Lagrange multiplier method and the penalty method, the proposed method can be always used safely to yield satisfactory results. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.