Symbolic and numerical analysis of plates in bending using Matlab

The implementation of the meshless collocation method using radial basis functions for solving partial differential equations involves the symbolic manipulation of governing equations. In the present work, the meshless method is used to solve the bending of plates, using a third order shear deformation theory. To avoid manually writing all the terms, the Symbolic Math Toolbox in Matlab is used to symbolically manipulate expressions. The final terms are written as Matlab functions to be used by the numerical main program.