Post-Processing Strutturale Mediante uso di Radial Basis Functions

Shape functions provide the deformation field inside a finite element from the nodal displacements: however it is known that this procedure entails a continuity issue. In this paper we propose a post-processing tool based on radial basis functions (RBFs) taking as input the results of FEM analyses. This strategy uses RBFs to interpolate the nodal displacements provided by FEM to obtain a continuous analytical series. The strain and stress fields result to be smooth throughout the whole domain because they come from analytical derivatives. An improvement with respect to FEM output has been obtained for a series of cases whose theoretical results are well-known from literature. This method has been applied also to the results of elastic-plastic analyses in order to smooth strain spikes.