Large deformation of shear-deformable plates by the boundary-element method

Boundary-integral equations for large deformation of shear-deformable plates are presented. Two different methods are used to calculate the derivatives of the nonlinear terms in the domain integral. The first approach requires the evaluation of a hypersingular domain integral. The second approach avoids the calculation of a hypersingular integral by utilizing radial basis functions to approximate the integrand. Quadratic isoparametric boundary-elements are used to discretise the boundary, and constant cell elements are used to discretise the domain. For the solution of a nonlinear problem four methods are presented. They include: total incremental method, cumulative-load incremental method, Euler method and nonlinear system method. Several examples are presented and comparisons with analytical results and other numerical results are made to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed methods.