ABSTRACT
Meshless or meshfree methods have been developed in recent years to circumvent restrictions imposed by formal element connectivity requirements in traditional finite element methods. A broad class of methods such as the element-free Galerkin method (Belytschko, L u and G u , 1994) is based on moving least squares They show tremendous promise for problems involving large deformations as well as moving interfaces or discontinuities. A n overview of developments in meshfree methods, was given by Belytschko et al. (1996). Other promising recent methods include the Reproducing Kernel Particle Method (L iu , Jun and Zhang, 1995), h-p clouds (Duarte and Oden, 1996), the partition of unity finite element method (Melenk and Babuska, 1996), and the meshless local Petrov-Galerkin method (Atluri and Zhu, 1998), to mention just a few. In this paper, a class of meshfree methods called natural neighbour methods are reviewed and their potential for application to life cycle engineering simulations is discussed.
