Thermal Analysis of Reissner-Mindlin Shallow Shells with FGM Properties by the MLPG

Abstract

A meshless local Petrov-Galerkin (MLPG) method is applied to solve problems of Reissner-Mindlin shells under thermal loading. Both stationary and thermal shock loads are an- alyzed here. Functionally graded materials with a continuous variation of properties in the shell thickness direction are considered here. A weak formulation for the set of governing equations in the Reissner-Mindlin theory is transformed into local integral equations on local subdomains in the base plane of the shell by using a unit test function. Nodalpointsarerandomlyspreadonthe surface of the plate and each node is surrounded by a circular subdomain to which local integral equations are applied. The meshless approxima- tion based on the Moving Least-Squares (MLS) method is employed for the implementation. Keyword: Meshless local Petrov-Galerkin method (MLPG), Moving least-squares (MLS) approximation, functionally graded materials, thermal load