I joined imechanica almost a year ago and I've been frequently following its interesting discussions, even the most animated ones. I think that a place like this is ideal to foster the exchange of ideas in the scientific community;

Moreover it is fantastic as a simple student like me can interact and easily ask questions to the most important researcher in the field of mechanics.

Hence, I thought it would have been the right place to pose a question which I believe is quite controversial. The debate I would like to open is about the future of meshless methods, are they still valid? It is worth to keep investigation in this area?

In the attached paper, we have used Variational Analysis techniques (in particular, the theory of epi-convergence) to prove the continuity of maximum-entropy basis functions. In general, for non-smooth functionals, moving objectives and/or constraints, the tools of Newton-Leibniz calculus (gradient, point-convergence) prove to be insufficient; notions of set-valued mappings, set-convergence, etc., are required. Epi-convergence bears close affinity to Gamma- or Mosco-convergence (widely used in the mathematical treatment of martensitic phase transformations). The introductory material on convex analysis and epi-convergence had to be omitted in the revised version; hence the material is by no means self-contained. Here are a few more pointers that would prove to be helpful. Our main point of reference is Variational Analysis by RTR and RJBW; the Princeton Classic Convex Analysis by RTR provides the important tools in convex analysis. For convex optimization, the text Convex Optimization by SB and LV (available online) is excellent. The lecture slides provide a very nice (and gentle) introduction to some of the important concepts in convex analysis. The epigraphical landscape is very rich, and many of the applications would resonate with mechanicians.

On a different topic (non-planar crack growth), we have coupled the x-fem to a new fast marching algorithm. Here are couple of animations on growth of an inclined penny crack in tension (unstructured tetrahedral mesh with just over 12K nodes): larger `time' increment and smaller `time' increment. This is joint-work with Chopp, Bechet and Moes (NSF-OISE project). I will update this page as and when more relevant links are available.

We are in the framework of small-strain two-dimensional linear elasticity without any body forces. Consider a domain that is discretized by a union of triangles and/or quadrilaterals (`patch of elements').  For C0 conforming approximations such as triangular/quadrilateral finite elements, the finite element approximation can exactly reproduce an arbitrary linear displacement field. Hence, if the exact solution is linear, then the finite element solution must match (within machine precision) the exact solution. In simple terms, passing the patch test for linear elasticity with standard conforming finite elements provides verification of one's implementation and is used to assess the same when new elements are proposed. For conforming elements, it is a sufficient condition for convergence (2nd order PDEs), and hence is the first problem that is solved when a new element/method is proposed. To carry out the patch test, the following steps are performed:

In meshfree (this is more in vogue than the term meshless) methods, two key steps need to be mentioned: (A) construction of the trial and test approximations; and (B) numerical evaluation of the weak form (Galerkin or Rayleigh-Ritz procedure) integrals, which lead to a linear system of equations (Kd = f). In meshfree Galerkin methods, the main departure from FEM is in (A): meshfree approximation schemes (linear combination of basis functions) are constructed independent of an underlying mesh (union of elements).

However, since a Galerkin method is typically used in solid mechanics applications, (B) arises and the weak form integrals need to be evaluated. Three main directions have been pursued to evaluate these integrals:

For someone with a background in solid mechanics and finite element methods, where should he go to read up on the elementary ideas of the meshfree methods?

An overview on meshfree approximation schemes that I recently posted can be found here. Following Zhigang's note indicating the limited accessibility of blogspot.com, a local version of the article is also provided. I am also attaching a PDF version of the html file. The conversion was done using PDF Online. An article that provides more details is also available online. JAVA applets for plotting basis functions can also be accessed [1D] [2D] [3D].