Coupled EFGM and FFEM for unbounded problems

This paper presents a coupling technique for integrating the element-free Galerkin method (EFGM) with the fractal finite element method (FFEM) to analyze unbounded problems in the half-space. FFEM is adopted to model the far field of an unbounded domain and EFGM is used in the near field. In the transition region interface elements are employed. The proposed method combines the best features of EFGM and FFEM, in the sense that no structured mesh or special enriched basis functions are necessary. The numerical results show that the proposed method performs extremely well converging rapidly to the analytical solution.