SIGNIFICANCE OF DIMENSIONLESS SIZE OF SUPPORT DOMAIN

IN ELEMENT FREE GALERKIN METHOD

JS Kushawaha*

*Indus Institute of Technology and Management, Bilhaur, Kanpur-209002,
E-mail-k.jitendrasingh@yahoo.com


ABSTRACT


The aim of this paper is to give a practical view of meshfree methods based on the study performed with the
help of MATLAB code. The various selectable parameters have been brought together and presented for
quick reference. The focus has been made for the selection of the dimensionless size of support domain,
S

in Element Free Galerkin (EFG) method. A comparison of finite element solution has been also performed
to compare the accuracy of the solutions. The EFG method was selected for the study for the reason of
being easy to implement and versatile. The effect of the variation of
S
is

studied and the significance of the
intuition, knowledge and experience of the analyst is brought to front with the help of the nodal parametric
solutions of a tapered elastic bar.


INTRODUCTION
Meshfree, Meshless or element free methods are the state of the art methods for the analysis of the various
physical problems which can be modeled and represented by the differential equations. These are called so
because these do not require a mesh of elements, which is mandatory for the mesh based methods like
Finite Element Methods.

Need
The finite element methods are well established and powerful computational / simulation techniques which
are used for modeling and analysis of physical phenomena in different fields of engineering and applied
sciences. It has successfully been applied for a large number of engineering applications, for example solid
mechanics, structure mechanics, electro magnetism, geo-mechanics, bio mechanics, aerodynamics and so
on, but it is with some shortcomings as mentioned below:

1. The use of mesh in modeling these problems creates difficulties in the treatment of discontinuities which
do not coincide with the original mesh lines.
2. In stress calculations, the stresses obtained using FEM packages are discontinuous and less accurate.
3. For modeling large deformation problems, considerable loss in accuracy arises when the elements in
mesh become extremely skewed or compressed.
4. It is very difficult to simulate the breakage of material into a large number of fragments as FEM is
essentially based on continuum mechanics, in which the elements formulated cannot be broken.
5. Adaptive processors require mappings of field variables between meshes in successive stages in solving
the problem. The frequent re-meshing and mapping introduces numerical error.
6. Creation of a mesh for the problem domain consumes major time of analyst using FEM packages. It
becomes a major component of the cost of a simulation project. The concern is more the manpower time,
and less the computer time.

To overcome the above difficulties meshfree methods have been developed which do not require a mesh to
discretize the problem and any connectivity between the nodes. The advantages of mesh free methods are
summarized as follows:
1. The approximate solution is constructed entirely in terms of a set of nodes.
2. There is no need to provide in advance any information about the relationship of the nodes, so it provides
flexibility in adding and deleting nodes whenever and wherever needed.




2
3. Since there is no need to create a mesh, and the nodes can be created by a computer in a fully automated
manner, it saves a lot of human effort.
4. They can easily handle very large deformation because connectivity can change with time.

Though there are so many advantages, mesh free methods too are not without disadvantages. Since mesh
free shape functions are rational functions, therefore, it requires highly accurate integration scheme to be
applied. It is to be noted that treatment of essential boundary conditions is not straight forward as in mesh
based methods since the shape functions of mesh free methods are not interpolants but approximants, which
implies that they do not satisfy the Kronecker delta property.

Element Free Galerkin Method
This meshfree method was developed in by the group of Prof. Ted Belytschko [2] based on the idea of
Lancaster and Salkauskas and probably motivated by the purpose to model arbitrary crack propagation
without computational expensive re-meshing. The method has been selected for the study of the variation of
meshfree solution with the variation in the dimensionless size of the support domain.

Boundary Representation
The Boundary representation in meshfree methods is done only by the arbitrary distribution of the nodes,
which may or may not be uniform. Fig. 1 shows the boundary representation for meshfree methods only by
the nodes and for FEM using the nodes & elements. The field variables of interest are specified on these
nodes.



Figure 1. Boundary representations in Meshfree Methods


Dimension of support domain
The dimensions of domain of influence affects the accuracy of the interpolation at the point of interest,
therefore the selection of suitable dimension of support domain is very important.[2,7] To define the
support domain for a point x
Q
, the dimension of the support domain d
s
is determined by

c s s
d d =
(1)
Where
s
is the dimensionless size of the support domain. d
c
is the characteristic length that relates to the
nodal spacing near the point x
Q.
If the nodes are uniformly distributed d
c
is simply the distance between the
two neighboring nodes. The uniform distribution has been considered for the ease of programming and
understanding the methodology; however the non-uniform distribution is also possible.

Meshfree solution Procedure
The solution procedure for the displacement parameters at the end of the bar using meshfree methodology is
as described by the following steps:
Step-1 Discretize the bar into number of nodes distributed uniformly over the domain = (0, 1). The
selection of the number of nodes is random and the convergence study has to be performed to arrive at the
optimum number of nodes, depending upon the accuracy and tolerance requirement of the solution. The
discretized bar is represented by fig. 2.




3

Figure 2. Meshfree representation of tapered elastic bar

Step-2 The integration cells are constructed for the one-point gauss-quadrature integration of the nodal
discrete equations. The number of integration cells is equal to (Number of nodes -1). The one-point gauss-
quadrature integration is performed using the equation:

I
r
I
I
b
a
w F d F dx x F

} }
=
~ =
1
) (

) (

) (
(2)
The integration points, weights and the Jacobeans for the each cell are set. W
I
= 2 for the one-point gauss
quadrature.

Figure 3. One-point Gauss quadrature

Step-3 The shape function is constructed by the MLS approximation method. In this method the linear
basis functions in one-dimension:
| | x x p
T
1 ) ( = (3)
and the quartic spline weight function:

+
=
0
, 3 8 6 1
) (
4 3 2
r r r
x x W
i

1
1
>
s
r
r
(4)
is used. In matrix form the shape function is obtained as:
) ( ) ( ) (
1
x B x A p x
i
T
i

= (5)
Step-4 The approximate solution is obtained using the shape function as:

i
n
i
i i
u x u

=
=
1
) ( (6)
Step-5 The nodal discrete equations are obtained using the constrained Galerkin weak form using the
Lagrange multiplier[2]. The weak form is developed from the governing differential [2, 3, 5, and 9]
equation:
0 ) ( = |
.
|

\
|
dx
du
x EA
dx
d
, 0<x<L (7)
Subject to the boundary conditions of the problem at hand are given by:
Approximate
area
Exact area
represented by
circles under the
curve
f
f(x)
-1
1
0




4
u(0) = 0, P
dx
du
x EA
x
=
(

=1
) ( (8)
where
|
.
|

\
|
=
L
x
A x A
2
1 ) (
0
(9)
The weak form of governing equation is solved for the discrete nodal equations as

dx
dx
d
dx
d
EA K
j
L T
i
ij

}
=
0
(10)

i
is the trial function, j is the test function and in the EFG method the trial and test functions are same as
the shape function. A good elaboration on this can be found in the books and papers [1, 2, 3, 4, and 6].

ui
L
k ik
d G
u
I =
}
I

(11)
t i i
d P f
t
I =
}
I

(12)
u i
d u q
u
I =
}
I
(13)
G
ik
,K
ij
, f
i
and q
i
are

the matrices for the boundary conditions, stiffness, force and displacement respectively.
The above equations are solved using the one-point gauss quadrature integration referred in the step-2[4].
Step-6 The above discrete nodal equations are assembled into global matrix:

(

=
(

q
f u
G
G K
T
0
(14)
is the Lagrange multiplier
Step-7 The essential boundary condition is imposed. The specified displacement at fixed end is equal to
zero, hence q=0.
Step-8 The global matrix is solved to obtain the nodal displacement parameters.
Step-9 The curves are plotted and the result is obtained.
The solution code using the MATLAB language is developed and the resulting data and plots are
recorded for further analysis.

Tapered Steel Bar
The Element Free Galerkin method is used for obtaining the displacement parameter at the end of the bar
applying the developed MATLAB code. The problem has been considered from Fundamentals of finite
element analysis by David V Hutton [1]. Fig. 4 depicts the tapered elastic bar subjected to an applied tensile
load P at the free end and attached to a fixed support at the other end. The cross-sectional area varies
linearly from A
0
at the fixed support at x = 0 to A
0
/2 at x = L. Calculation of the displacement parameter at
the end of the bar was performed considering the following:
(a) Exact analytical solution
(b) Using the meshfree methodology
The material property and load data considered are given by:
Length of the bar, L = 1 m
Area of cross-section at fixed end, A
0
= 1 m
2
Area of cross-section at free end, A
1
= 0.5 m
2

Youngs modulus of Elasticity, E = 200*10
9
N/m
2

Point Load, P = 1000*10
3
N




5
The material properties considered in the referred original problem are taken as unity and the plot
obtained are given by the Fig. 5; the figure has been taken directly from the source. The plot obtained by
considering the similar data of unit force and material property and using the MATLAB code for meshfree
method is represented by Fig. 6 and three curve for 21 and 111 nodes along with the exact solution are
plotted to indicate the effect of number of nodes on the accuracy of the solution.


Figure 4. The tapered elastic bar subjected to an applied tensile load P



Figure 5. Displacement solutions plot from the original problem using FEM


Figure 6. Displacement solutions using meshfree method





6
Selection of dimensionless size of support domain
The selection of the dimension of support domain affects the accuracy of the approximate solution. This is
one of the selectable parameters which need to be selected appropriately by the analyst to arrive at the
correct and accurate solution. This has to be different for the different classes or complexities of the
problems, from simple geometry to complex shapes. The selection depends on the intuition and the
experience of the analyst otherwise fresher has to adopt the trial and error methodology and verification
from other methods to arrive at the optimum choice. The other selectable variables for the Element Free
Galerkin method and present study are given in table-1.

Table 1 Selectable variables

Sl No. Selectable variable Value
1 Weighting Function Quartic Spline:

+
=
0
, 3 8 6 1
) (
4 3 2
r r r
x x W
i

1
1
>
s
r
r

2 Basis Function One Dimensional Linear:
| | x x p
T
1 ) ( =
3 Integration One point Gauss-Quadrature
4 Prevention of Singularity of
Moment matrix
Shifting of nodes
5 Construction of
shape function
Moving Least Square Method
6 Number of Nodes 21 and 111


To study the effect of variation of
S,
on the solution for the nodal displacement parameters of the
bar, with the above data, the different values for the
S
were chosen and the plots for the meshfree solution
of the bar obtained which is shown by the Fig. 5 along with the exact solution. It is clearly noticeable that
the value of
S
=2.5 gives a result in the form of rough approximating curve whereas decrease in its value
provides better approximation to the curve of exact solution. The various displacement values of the end of
the bar are tabulated in Table-2. The data obtained is represented by the fig. 6.




Figure 6. Effect of dimensionless size of support domain,
S

CONCLUSION
The variation of the solution for the displacement parameter at the end of the bar with respect to
S
, is
presented by fig.7, it is clear from the given plot that there is an optimum value for the
S
where we can get
the best approximation to the exact solution. In present case it approximates to 2.1. Hence, the judgment,
knowledge, experience and intuition of the analyst plays vital role in the selection of the variable
parameters of the meshfree methods for getting the significantly correct solution for the problem in hand
depending upon the complexity and its nature.





7


Figure 7. Effect of dimensionless size of support domain,
S


Table 2 Displacement Parameter

S. no. Value of Alpha Displacement Parameter at the end of bar
1 1.4 6.80700 microns
2 1.5 6.80700 microns
3 1.6 6.81733 microns
5 1.7 6.83977 microns
6 1.8 6.86420 microns
7 1.9 6.88305 microns
8 2.0 6.89325 microns
9 2.1 6.89540 microns
10 2.2 6.89181 microns
11 2.3 6.88476 microns
12 2.4 6.87596 microns
13 2.5 6.86658 microns
14 Exact Solution 6.93147 microns



REFERENCES
[1] David V. Hutton, Fundamentals of finite element analysis, Mc-Graw Hill, 2004.
[2] G.R. Liu, Mesh Free Methods: Moving beyond the finite element method, CRC Press, 2003.
[3] J. Dolbow and T. Belytschko, An introduction to programming the meshless element- free galerkin
method, Archives in Computational Mechanics, 5 (1998) 207-241.
[4] J.N. Reddy, An introduction to the finite element methods , McGraw-Hill, 2003
[5] J.S. Kushawaha, Mesh free analysis of elastic bar, Master Thesis, Department of mechanical
engineering, HBTI, Kanpur, 2009.
[6] T. Belytscho, Y.Y. Lu, L.Gu, Element-free galerkin methods, International Journal for Numerical
Methods in Engineering, 37(1994) 229-256.
[7] T. Belytscho, Y. Krongauz, D. Organ, M. Fleming, P. Krysl, Meshless methods: An overview and
recent developments, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 139 (1996) 3-47.
[8] T.P. Fries, H.G. Matthies, Classification and overview of meshfree methods, Scientific Computing,
2004.
[9] Vivek Varshney, Element free galerkin method for analysis of reinforced granular beds on soft soil,
Master Thesis, Department of civil engineering, IIT, Kanpur, 2008.