Recent developments of meshfree and particle methods and their applications in applied mechanics are surveyed. Three major methodologies have been reviewed. First, smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is discussed as a representative of a non-local kernel, strong form collocation approach. Second, mesh-free Galerkin methods, which have been an active research area in recent years, are reviewed. Third, some applications of molecular dynamics (MD) in applied mechanics are discussed. The emphases of this survey are placed on simulations of finite deformations, fracture, strain localization of solids; incompressible as well as compressible flows; and applications of multiscale methods and nano-scale mechanics. This review article includes 397 references.

This document presents comprehensive historical accounts on the developments of finite element methods (FEM) since 1941, with a specific emphasis on developments related to solid mechanics. We present a historical overview beginning with the theoretical formulations and origins of the FEM, while discussing important developments that have enabled the FEM to become the numerical method of choice for so many problems rooted in solid mechanics.

In a previous work, the authors have presented a formalism for deriving systematically invariant, symmetric finite difference algorithms for nonlinear evolution differential equations that admit conserved quantities. This formalism is herein cast in the context of exact finite difference calculus. The algorithms obtained from the proposed formalism are shown to derive exactly from discrete scalar potential functions using finite difference calculus, in the same sense as that of the corresponding differential equation being derivable from its associated energy function (a conserved quantity). A clear ramification of this result is that the derived algorithms preserve certain discrete invariant quantities, which are the consistent counterpart of the invariant quantities in the continuous case. Results on the nonlinear stability of a class of algorithms that are derived using the proposed formalism, and that preserve energy or linear momentum, are discussed in the context of finite difference calculus. Some numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the conservation property of the proposed algorithms.