Bending analysis of folded laminated plates by the FSDT meshfree method

A meshfree method is developed in this paper to study the flexure behavior of folded laminated plates. A folded laminated plate is considered as an assembly of laminates. Based on the first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) and the moving-least square approximation, the stiffness equations of the laminates are derived. A treatment is implemented to modify the equations, and the equations are then superposed to obtain the governing equation of the entire folded laminated plate. No mesh is required in the determination of the stiffness equations of the laminates, and therefore the proposed method is more flexible than the finite element methods. The convergence and accuracy of the proposed method are examined by computing several numerical examples, and good agreement is observed between the present results and those given by ANSYS.