A meshless method for Kirchhoff plate bending problems

In this work a meshless method for the analysis of bending of thin homogeneous plates is presented. This meshless method is based on the use of radial basis functions to build an approximation of the general solution of the partial differential equations governing the Kirchhoff plate bending problem. In order to obtain a symmetric and non-singular linear equation system the Hermite collocation method is used. To assess the formulation a series of plates with different boundary conditions are analysed. Comparisons are made with other results available in the literature. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.