H‐p clouds—an h‐p meshless method

TLDR: The approximating properties of the h-p cloud functions are investigated in this article and a several theorems concerning these properties are presented.

Abstract: A new methodology to build discrete models of boundary-value problems is presented. The h-pcloud method is applicable to arbitrary domains and employs only a scattered set of nodes to build approximate solutions to BVPs. This new method uses radial basis functions of varying size of supports and with polynomialreproducing properties of arbitrary order. The approximating properties of the h-p cloud functions are investigated in this article and a several theorems concerning these properties are presented. Moving least squares interpolants are used to build a partition of unity on the domain of interest. These functions are then used to construct, at a very low cost, trial and test functions for Galerkin approximations. The method exhibits a very high rate of convergence and has a greater -exibility than traditional h-p finite element methods. Several numerical experiments in I-D and 2-D are also presented. @ 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. In most large-scale numerical simulations of physical phenomena, a large percentage of the overall computational effort is expended on technical details connected with meshing. These details include, in particular, grid generation, mesh adaptation to domain geometry, element or cell connectivity, grid motion and separation to model fracture, fragmentation, free surfaces, etc. Moreover, in most computer-aided design work, the generation of an appropriate mesh constitutes, by far, the costliest portion of the computer-aided analysis of products and processes. These are among the reasons that interest in so-called meshless methods has grown rapidly in recent years. Most meshless methods require a scattered set of nodal points in the domain of interest. In these methods, there may be no fixed connectivities between the nodes, unlike the finite element or finite difference methods. This feature has significant implications in modeling some physical phenomena that are characterized by a continuous change in the geometry of the domain under analysis. The analysis of problems such as crack propagation, penetration, and large deformations, can, in principle, be greatly simplified by the use of meshless methods. A growing crack, for example, can be modeled by simply extending the free surfaces that correspond to the crack [ 11. The analysis of large deformation problems by, e.g., finite element methods, may require the continuous remeshing of the domain to avoid the breakdown of the calculation due to