APPLICATION OF DISCONTINUOUS SOLUTIONS IN BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD FOR THE BENDING PROBLEMS OF KIRCHHOFF PLATES WITH AN ARBITRARY CONTOUR

Abstract

The discontinuous solutions represent a new direction for the indirect Boundary Element Method (BEM) in the indirect formulation. Discontinuous solutions represent those functions, which when crossing certain lines, the transverse deflection, the slope angle, the bending moment and the generalized shear force may have jumps. These can be used to solve important problems for which the existing methods do not have solutions or a satisfactory accuracy, such as: plates of arbitrary contour, presence of defects, mixed boundary conditions, contact problems, infinite domains etc. In this paper, we describe the methodology of application and the numerical implementation of discontinuous solutions for the bending problems of plates with an arbitrary contour in the classical theory (Kirchhoff). For this purpose, programming codes were developed in the Matlab language, which allowed to calculate the displacements and efforts in the plate. The obtained results were compared with the Finite Element Method (FEM) for different mesh densities.