Element-free geometrically nonlinear analysis of quadrilateral functionally graded material plates with internal column supports

A nonlinear deflection analysis is carried out for internal column supported functionally graded material (FGM) arbitrarily straight-sided quadrilateral plates under a uniformly distributed loading. In order to achieve this aim, the formulation of a discrete nonlinear governing equation for large deformation is undertaken based on the element-free IMLS-Ritz method. The first-order shear deformation theory and von Kármán assumption are adopted in the formulation. In this study, the computation involves a geometric transformation from the physical quadrilateral domain to a square computational domain. Several example problems are selected to illustrate the effect of internal column support distributions on the maximum deflection and deformed shape of the FGM plates. In addition, parametric studies on the effect of volume fraction ratio, geometry and length-to-thickness ratio on the large deflection behavior of FGM plates are examined.