RBF-Based Meshless Method for Large Deflection of Elastic Thin Rectangular Plates with Boundary Conditions Involving Free Edges

An RBF-based meshless method is presented for the analysis of thin plates undergoing large deflection. The method is based on collocation with the multiquadric radial basis function (MQ-RBF). In the proposed method, the resulting coupled nonlinear equations are solved using an incremental-iterative procedure. The accuracy and efficiency of the method are verified through several numerical examples. The inclusion of the free edge boundary condition proves that this method is accurate and efficient in handling such complex boundary value problems.