AN IMPROVED ELEMENT FREE GALERKIN FORMULATION

An improved formulation of the Element-Free Galerkin Method (EFGM) is presented in this paper. The major shortcoming of the conventional EFG M has been that, due to the use of Moving Least-Squares (MLS) approxim ation, it does not allow the explicit prescription of boundary conditi ons. Lagrange multipliers have been employed to circumvent this proble m undermining the attractiveness of the method. The proposed EFGM form ulation eliminates this shortcoming through the use of a set of MLS in terpolants that employ singular weight functions. The validity, accura cy and efficiency of the present formulation are demonstrated through the solution of a variety of example problems. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.