Radial basis functions based on differential quadrature method for the free vibration analysis of laminated composite arbitrarily shaped plates

The conventional strong form collocation approach known as Differential Quadrature (DQ) method has been applied in the past to a vast type of engineering problems. It is well-known that its application is strictly limited to regular regions where derivatives are approximated along mesh lines. Generally, its accuracy increases when the number of collocation points is large and the method tends to be stable. However, for some numerical problems several points are needed in order to obtain an accurate solution. Changing the basis functions another numerical technique was developed called Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) method, which has the advantage of approximating derivatives using irregular point distributions and the basis functions depend on the mutual radial distance of the grid points. In order to extend the idea of DQ method to a general case a Radial Basis Function based on Differential Quadrature (RBF-DQ) method has been recently developed. This method merges the advantages of both techniques. Furthermore, this work proposes the application of RBF-DQ when a domain decomposition technique is considered. In this way it will be shown that, using some kind of basis functions the number of grid points per element can be reduced compared to other classical approaches. Furthermore, once the shape parameter is fixed for one case, it is not needed to calculate it again for other applications. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.