A NODE-BASED ERROR ESTIMATOR FOR THE ELEMENT-FREE GALERKIN (EFG) METHOD

Meshless methods are suitable for adaptive analysis, as the nodes are unstructured, and can be added or deleted freely. However, the smooth shape functions may produce spurious oscillation away from the region containing error, which may result in addition of unnecessary nodes. In order to avoid the influence of spurious oscillation on adaptive analysis, a node-based error estimator is presented. The recovered nodal stress value is obtained from a reference solution using a double refinement technique. Numerical tests are presented illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach in the terms of the number and distribution of nodes compared with traditional approaches.