The Element-free Method For Structure Analysis Of Steam Turbine Rotor

The element-free method is a new numerical method, which requires only nodal data and whose shape functions are continual and differentiable. The element-free method employs moving least-square approximants to approximate original functions. In this paper, the relevant theories about the construction of moving least-square approximants such as the choice of weight functions, domains, shape functions and penalty coefficients are described. Discrete equations of axial symmetry problem are obtained by variational principle and Gaussian quadrature. Several numerical examples indicate that the element-free method can obtain more accurate results about these problems, moreover, results and their gradients are continuous in the entire domain and post-processing to obtain a smooth gradient field is total unnecessary. Finaly, the element-free method is applied to heat conduction and thermal stress problems for steam turbine rotor.