A SPH-GFDM Coupled Method for Elasticity Analysis

SPH (smoothed particle hydrodynamics) is one of the oldest meshless methods used to simulate mechanics of continuum media. Despite its great advantage over the traditional grid-based method, implementing boundary conditions in SPH is not easy and the accuracy near the boundary is low. When SPH is applied to problems for elasticity, the displacement or stress boundary conditions should be suitably handled in order to achieve fast convergence and acceptable numerical accuracy. The GFDM (generalized finite difference method) can derive explicit formulae for required partial derivatives of field variables. Hence, a SPH–GFDM coupled method is developed to overcome the disadvantage in SPH. This coupled method is applied to 2-D elastic analysis in both symmetric and asymmetric computational domains. The accuracy of this method is demonstrated by the excellent agreement with the results obtained from FEM (finite element method) regardless of the symmetry of the computational domain. When the computational domain is multiply connected, this method needs to be further improved.