Analysis of Multi-material Bonded Assemblies on a Non-conforming Mesh

Bonded multi-material assemblies arise frequently in design, manufacturing, architecture, and materials design. It is a common wisdom that finite element analysis of such assemblies usually requires all components to be represented by compatible finite element meshes; application of meshfree methods in such situations is often considered problematic due to the need to impose additional interface conditions. Neither approach scales to deal with realistically complex models arising in many applications. We propose a simple extension of meshfree analysis on a non-conforming mesh for linear structural analysis of such multimaterial assemblies. The method is simple, can be implemented within most FEA packages and does not require either compatible meshing or complex interface boundary conditions. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that computed results are in good agreement with known analytical and computational results for well studied multi-material bonded assemblies (lap and butt joints). We also demonstrate application of the proposed method to realistically complex assembly of a mounted sculpture that cannot be easily analysed by other methods.