Treatment of material discontinuity in the Element-Free Galerkin method

A method is presented for application of the Element-Free Galerkin method (EFG) to solid mechanics problems containing material discontinuities. By using the EFG method, the trial and test functions for the weak form are constructed with moving least-square interpolants in each material domain. Additional constraints are imposed at the Variational level to ensure satisfaction of interface conditions. As a result, only nodal data (no elemental connectivity) is needed. Given C-1 continuity of the interpolant weighting function, the dependent variable and its gradient are continuous in each material domain. Two linear elastic bi-material examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.