Essential boundary and interface conditions in the meshless analysis of shells.

Abstract

AcknowledgmentsFirstly, I would like to thank Prof. Paulo Pimenta for taking me as a student and guiding me through my research and more importantly through a real academic formation.Thank you for the many fruitfull and happy get-togethers and conversations, about my research and a whole variaty of other subjects. It has been an honor to be your student.Other masters were also kind enough to advise and help me, especially Prof. Carlos Tiago who welcomed me for a stay in Lisbon during my masters and became my referrence for all matters of meshless methods, and Prof. Eduardo Campello for great insights and helpful discussions.My sincere gratitute to Prof. Peter Wriggers for receiving me at the Institut für Kontinuumsmechanik in Hannover for a proli c and very pleasant year. Thank you for helping my research and formation.To my co-workers and o ce mates, thank you for providing a nice working environment, for attentive ears to obstacles and smily faces for the happy-hours. We use the EFG discretization technique for thick Reissner-Mindlin shells and adapt the weak form as to separate displacement and rotational degrees of freedom and obtain suitable and separate stabilization parameters. This approach enables the modeling of discontinuous shells and local re nement on multi-region problems.