Static Deformations and Natural Frequencies of Functionally Graded Plates by a Hybrid Meshless Method

In this paper we apply a hybrid numerical scheme based on pseudospectral methods radial basis functions. This is a global collocation method that avoids the tensor-product grids of pseudospectral methods. The static deformations and the free vibration analysis of functionally graded plates is performed. We use the first and third order shear deformation theories. In functionally graded materials we seek the equivalent, homogeneized, material properties. Here the estimation of the elastic material properies is based on the Mori-Tanaka technique which presents a better estimate than the law of mixtures. We compare the present meshless method with exact solutions by Vel and Batra and an alternative meshless solution by Qian and colleagues, based on the meshless local Petrov-Galerkin method. The present radial basis function solution produces highly accurate results, particularly when the third order shear deformation theory is used.