ABSTRACT
A beam is a simple but a very common and important structural component. A huge volume of earlier research work has focused on analysis of beams. The finite element method (FEM) is now the mainstream method for analysis of all kinds of problems involving beams. In recent years, MFree methods have also been applied to analyzing beams, such as EFG method for modal analyses of Euler-Bernoulli beams and Kirchhoff plates (Ouatouati and Johnson, 1999), MLPG for thin beams (Atluri et al., 1999a), and LPIM and LRPIM for both thin and thick beams (Gu and Liu, G. R., 2001d,e).
