Treatment of material discontinuity in the Element-Free Galerkin method Original Research Article

A method is presented for application of the Element-Free Galerkin method (EFG) to solid mechanics problems containing material discontinuities. By using the EFG method, the trial and test functions for the weak form are constructed with moving least-square interpolants in each material domain. Additional constraints are imposed at the variational level to ensure satisfaction of interface conditions. As a result, only nodal data (no elemental connectivity) is needed. Given C1 continuity of the interpolant weighting function, the dependent variable and its gradient are continuous in each material domain. Two linear elastic bi-material examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.