An Extended Cell-Based Smoothed Three-Node Mindlin Plate Element (XCS-MIN3) for Free Vibration Analysis of Cracked FGM Plates

A cell-based smoothed three-node Mindlin plate element (CS-MIN3) was recently proposed and proven to be robust for static and free vibration analyses of Mindlin plates. The method improves significantly the accuracy of the solution due to softening effect of the cell-based strain smoothing technique. In addition, it is very flexible to apply for arbitrary complicated geometric domains due to using only three-node triangular elements which can be easily generated automatically. However so far, the CS-MIN3 has been only developed for isotropic material and for analyzing intact structures without possessing internal cracks. The paper hence tries to extend the CS-MIN3 by integrating itself with functionally graded material (FGM) and enriched functions of the extended finite element method (XFEM) to give a so-called extended cell-based smoothed three-node Mindlin plate (XCS-MIN3) for free vibration analysis of cracked FGM plates. Three numerical examples with different conditions are solved and compared with previous published results to illustrate the accuracy and reliability of the XCS-MIN3 for free vibration analysis of cracked FGM plates.