Our new work, focused on the meshless computation of strains for large displacements in flexible circuit boards, was published in Micromachines.

Groth, C.; Chiappa, A.; Porziani, S.; Salvini, P.; Biancolini, M.E. “An RBF Meshless Approach to Evaluate Strain Due to Large Displacements in Flexible Printed Circuit Boards”. Micromachines 2022, 13, 1163. https://doi.org/10.3390/ mi13081163

Abstract:

Thin plates are very often employed in a context of large displacements and rotations, for example, whenever the extreme flexibility of a body can replace the use of complicated kinematic pairs. This is the case of the flexible Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) used, for example, within last-generation foldable laptops and consumer electronics products. In these applications, the range of motion is generally known in advance, and a simple strategy of stress assessment leaving out nonlinear numerical calculations appears feasible other than desirable. In this paper, Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) are used to represent a generic transformation of a bi-dimensional plate, with all the derivate fields being analytically achieved without the need for a numerical grid for large-displacement applications. Strains due to bending are easily retrieved with this method and satisfactorily compared to analytical and shell-based Finite Element Method (FEM) benchmarks. On the other hand, the computational costs of the juxtaposed methods appear far different; with the machine being equal, the orders of magnitude of the time elapsed in computation are seconds for the RBF-based strategy versus minutes for the FEM approach.

The paper can be downloaded or read at this link: https://doi.org/10.3390/mi13081163