A local Heaviside weighted meshless method for two-dimensional solids using radial basis functions

A meshless method is developed for the stress analysis of two-dimensional solids, based on a local weighted residual method with the Heaviside step function as the weighting function over a local subdomain. Trial functions are constructed using radial basis functions (RBF). The present method is a truly meshless method based only on a number of randomly located nodes. No domain integration is needed, no element matrix assembly is required and no special treatment is needed to impose the essential boundary conditions. Effects of the sizes of local subdomain and interpolation domain on the performance of the present method are investigated. The behaviour of shape parameters of multiquadrics (MQ) has been systematically studied. Example problems in elastostatics are presented and compared with closed-form solutions and show that the proposed method is highly accurate and possesses no numerical difficulties.