Meshless Local Petrov-Galerkin Method for Elasto-Static Analysis of Thick-Walled Isotropic Laminated Cylinders

In this paper, one of the simplest and most regular members of the family of the Meshless Local Petrov-Galerkin (MLPG) methods; namely MLPG5, is applied to analyze the thick-walled isotropic laminated cylinders under elasto-static pressure. A novel simple technique is proposed to eliminate a very important difficulty of the meshless methods to deal with material discontinuities regarding to the high continuity of their shape functions. The Moving Least Squares (MLS) approximation is used for constructing the trial functions, and a simple Heaviside step function is chosen for the test function. The direct interpolation method is employed to impose the essential boundary conditions. Acceptable agreements with the analytical solutions and finite element method results are obtained specially at the material discontinuity boundaries, which suggest its application in other classes of problems.