Meshless methods in dual analysis: Theoretical and implementation issues

This paper presents a meshless implementation of dual analysis for 2D linear elasticity problems. The derivation of the governing systems of equations for the discretized compatible and equilibrated models is detailed and crucial implementation issues of the proposed algorithm are discussed: (i) arising of deficiencies associated with the independent approximation field used for the imposition of the essential boundary conditions (EBC) for the two parts of the boundary sharing a corner and (ii) determination of the Lagrange multipliers functional space used to impose EBC. An attempt to implement the latter resulted in an approximation which is nothing more than the trace on the essential boundary of the domain nodal functions. The difficulties posed by such approximation are explained using the inf–sup condition.Several examples of global (energy) and local (displacements) quantities of interest and their bounds determination are used to demonstrate the validity of the presented meshless approach to dual analysis. Numerical assessment of the convergence rates obtained for both models is made, for different polynomial basis degrees.