Numerical simulations of large deformation of thin shell structures using meshfree methods

Abstract

In this paper, meshfree simulations of large deformation of thin shell structures is presented. It has been shown that the window function based meshfree interpolants can be used to construct highly smoothed (high order “manifold”) shape functions for three-dimensional (3-D) meshfree discretization/interpolation, which can be used to simulate large deformation of thin shell structures while avoiding ill-conditioning as well as stiffening in numerical computations. The main advantage of such 3-D meshfree continuum approach is its simplicity in both formulation and implementation as compared to shell theory approach, or degenerated continuum approach. Moreover, it is believed that the accuracy of the computation may increase because of using 3-D exact formulation. Possible mechanism to relieve shear/volumetric locking due to the meshfree interpolation is discussed. Several examples have been computed by using a meshfree, explicit, total Lagrangian formulation. Towards to developing a self-contact algorithm, a novel meshfree contact algorithm is proposed in the end.