A novel computational approach for functionally graded isotropic and sandwich plate structures based on a rotation-free meshfree method

This paper investigates a rotation-free moving Kriging (MK) meshfree approach for isotropic and sandwich functionally graded material (FGM) plates based on a refined plate theory (RPT). The present formulation makes certain that the tangential stress-free boundary conditions at the top and bottom surfaces of the plate are satisfied with any nonlinear distribution functions. The basic idea of computational method behind this work is to exploit a quartic spline correlation function for establishment of MK basic shape functions. Our finding yields an improved meshfree formulation whose solution becomes certainly stable and no longer depends on a correlation parameter θ. In particular, it is interesting that boundary conditions related to the slopes can be eliminated by a simple rotation-free technique as addressed in isogeometric analysis. Our method uses only four variables for each node and hence the computational cost is completely well-controlled. Several numerical examples are provided to validate high reliability of the present method in comparison with other numerical methods. The present results also show that no shear locking is observed.