Meshfree analysis with the aid of NURBS boundary.

We present a meshfree analysis framework to integrate the geometric exactness of non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS)-based isogeometric analysis (IGA) (Hughes et al., Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 194:4135–4195, 2005) with the flexibility of meshfree approximations. In the framework, only the NURBS boundary surface immediately available from CAD tools is used to describe the exact problem domain, and meshfree particles are inserted inside the boundary surface, in a flexible manner, for construction of the approximation for analysis. Nitche’s method is employed for imposing essential boundary conditions and the domain integration in the Galerkin formulation is performed based on variationally consistent integration (VCI) to recover integration exactness. The NURBS boundary surface from CAD serves as an aid in selecting particle distributions and as the integration net for the boundary integration required both for the Nitche’s method and the VCI. As shown in numerical studies, the VCI is essential for the solution accuracy of the method. Several benchmarks are tested to examine the effectiveness of the proposed framework and numerical results are compared with those obtained by the IGA.