Comparing the Accuracy and Sensitivity of Mesh-Free and Finite Element Methods in Vibration Analysis

This paper uses the flexural vibration of cantilever beams as a benchmark problem to test mesh-free and finite element methods in structural dynamics. First, a symbolic analysis of the “kernel collocation” type mesh-free method is carried out, in which the collocation function satisfies the boundary conditions. This enables both Finite Element (FE) and mesh-free results to be compared with exact analytical ones. Thereafter, the natural frequencies and Frequency Response Function (FRF), in terms of the beam parameters, are determined and compared with the analytical results, that exist in the literature. It is shown that by adjusting the parameters of the kernel function, we can find identical peaks to those of the analytical method. The finite element method is also employed to solve this problem, and the first three natural frequencies were computed in terms of the beam parameters. When comparing the two methods, we see that by increasing the number of elements in the FEM we can always achieve better accuracy, but we will obtain twice the number of modal frequencies. However, the mesh-free method with the same number of nodes does not provide these extra frequencies. From this benchmark problem, it is concluded that the accuracy of the mesh-free methods always depends on the adjustment of the kernel function. However, the FEM is advantageous because it does not require such adjustments.