Convergence studies in meshfree peridynamic simulations

Meshfree methods are commonly applied to discretize peridynamic models, particularly in numerical simulations of engineering problems. Such methods discretize peridynamic bodies using a set of nodes with characteristic volume, leading to particle-based descriptions of systems. In this paper, we perform convergence studies of static peridynamic problems. We show that commonly used meshfree methods in peridynamics suffer from accuracy and convergence issues, due to a rough approximation of the contribution of nodes near the boundary of the neighborhood of a given node to numerical integrations. We propose two methods to improve meshfree peridynamic simulations. The first method uses accurate computations of volumes of intersections between neighbor cells and the neighborhood of a given node, referred to as partial volumes. The second method employs smooth influence functions with a finite support within peridynamic kernels. Numerical results demonstrate great improvements in accuracy and convergence of peridynamic numerical solutions when using the proposed methods.