Meshless Analysis of Nonlocal Boundary Value Problems in Anisotropic and Inhomogeneous Media

In this work, meshless methods based on a radial basis function (RBF) are applied for the solution of two-dimensional steady-state heat conduction problems with nonlocal multi-point boundary conditions (NMBC). These meshless procedures are based on the multiquadric (MQ) RBF and its modified version (i.e., integrated MQ RBF). The meshless method is extended to the NMBC and compared with the standard collocation method (i.e., Kansa's method). In extended methods, the interior and the boundary solutions are approximated with a sum of RBF series, while in Kansa's method, a single series of RBF is considered. Three different sorts of solution domains are considered in which Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions are specified on some part of the boundary while the unknown function values of the remaining portion of the boundary are related to a discrete set of interior points. The influences of NMBC on the accuracy and condition number of the system matrix associated with the proposed methods are investigated. The sensitivity of the shape parameter is also analyzed in the proposed methods. The performance of the proposed approaches in terms of accuracy and efficiency is confirmed on the benchmark problems.