A truly meshless pre- and post-processor for meshless analysis methods

In recent years, meshless methods have been developed to eliminate the known drawbacks in finite element methods. Generating the input file for a meshless method and interpreting the output obtained can be difficult without graphical pre-processing and post-processing support. Unfortunately, most existing pre- and post-processing techniques are based on using an underlying finite element mesh or finite difference grid. Since meshless methods have neither, new approaches are required for providing this support for meshless methods. In this paper, a pre-processor and a post-processor are presented for the meshless method using node-based and pixel-based approaches as opposed to an element-based approach. Pre-processing supports for automated generation of nodes, support domains, and sub-domains along with local refining are also included. An extensive example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the given pre-processor and post-processor.