In recent years meshless/meshfree methods have gained considerable attention in engineering and applied mathematics. The variety of problems that are now being addressed by these techniques continues to expand and the quality of the results obtained demonstrates the effectiveness of many of the methods currently available. The book presents a significant sample of the state of the art in the field with methods that have reached a certain level of maturity while also addressing many open issues.

The book collects extended original contributions presented at the Second ECCOMAS Conference on Meshless Methods held in 2007 in Porto. The list of contributors reveals a fortunate mix of highly distinguished authors as well as quite young but very active and promising researchers, thus giving the reader an interesting and updated view of different meshless approximation methods and their range of applications. The material presented is appropriate for researchers, engineers, physicists, applied mathematicians and graduate students interested in this active research area.

This book intend to supply readers with some MATLAB codes for ?nite element analysis of solids and structures. After a short introduction to MATLAB, the book illustrates the ?nite element implementation of some problems by simple scripts and functions. The following problems are discussed: * Discrete systems, such as springs and bars * Beams and frames in bending in 2D and 3D * Plane stress problems * Plates in bending * Free vibration of Timoshenko beams and Mindlin plates, including laminated composites * Buckling of Timoshenko beams and Mindlin plates The book does not intends to give a deep insight into the ?nite element details, just the basic equations so that the user can modify the codes. The book was prepared for undergraduate science and engineering students, although it may be useful for graduate students. TheMATLABcodesofthisbookareincludedinthedisk.Readersarewelcomed to use them freely. The author does not guarantee that the codes are error-free, although a major e?ort was taken to verify all of them. Users should use MATLAB 7.0 or greater when running these codes. Any suggestions or corrections are welcomed by an email to [email protected].

In recent years meshless/meshfree methods have gained considerable attention in engineering and applied mathematics. The variety of problems that are now being addressed by these techniques continues to expand and the quality of the results obtained demonstrates the effectiveness of many of the methods currently available. The book presents a significant sample of the state of the art in the field with methods that have reached a certain level of maturity while also addressing many open issues. The book collects extended original contributions presented at the Second ECCOMAS Conference on Meshless Methods held in 2007 in Porto. The list of contributors reveals a fortunate mix of highly distinguished authors as well as quite young but very active and promising researchers, thus giving the reader an interesting and updated view of different meshless approximation methods and their range of applications. The material presented is appropriate for researchers, engineers, physicists, applied mathematicians and graduate students interested in this active research area.