An improved finite cloud method with uniformly distributed clouds and enhanced boundary conditions.

Abstract

Finite cloud method (FCM) employs the fixed kernel reproducing technique to construct the interpolation function and point collocation approach is adopted for the discretization. In this study, an improved FCM is proposed such that a node of interest is approximated with its nearest cloud. This feature enables a set of uniformly distributed clouds of various densities such that all the information in the problem domain is captured and stored in the clouds. Additionally, the instability of FCM near the boundaries is treated by having the boundary nodes also satisfy the governing differential equation. Besides, a splitting mechanism is suggested for the node refinement to improve the accuracy of solution. Parameters are introduced to control the density of clouds and the singularity of the moment matrices associated with the clouds. Thus, a more controllable numerical simulation is developed. Numerical examples are presented and the results have shown that the improved FCM produces a stable and better accuracy of solution.