Dispersion and stability properties of radial basis collocation method for elastodynamics

Strong form collocation with radial basis approximation, called the radial basis collocation method (RBCM), is introduced for the numerical solution of elastodynamics. In this work, the proper weights for the boundary collocation equations to achieve the optimal convergence in elastodynamics are first derived. The von Neumann method is then introduced to investigate the dispersion characteristics of the semidiscrete RBCM equation. Very small dispersion error (< 1%) in RBCM can be achieved compared to linear and quadratic finite elements. The stability conditions of the RBCM spatial discretization in conjunction with the central difference temporal discretization are also derived. We show that the shape parameter of the radial basis functions not only has strong influence on the dispersion errors, it also has profound influence on temporal stability conditions in the case of lumped mass. Further, our stability analysis shows that, in general, a larger critical time step can be used in RBCM with central difference temporal discretization than that for finite elements with the same temporal discretization. Our analysis also suggests that although RBCM with lumped mass allows a much larger critical time step than that of RBCM with consistent mass, the later offers considerably better accuracy and should be considered in the transient analysis. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 2013