This paper on "Diffuse Elements - Variational and Collocation Approaches" was presented at the NAFEMS World Congress on Effective Engineering Analysis - 25-28 April 1999, Newport, Rhode Island, USA.

Summary

This paper summarizes some recent advances in the diffuse element method currently under development. We focalize at four issues: efficient shape functions generation, essentially boundary conditions implemented with a non-singular weighting functions, an explicit form of the shape functions and finally we present some results obtained with a new collocation method based on a double grid approach.