Shear locking treatment by using an n-node discrete shear gap technique in a meshfree method

In this work, a shear locking treatment for thin First-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) plates based on the n-node discrete shear gap is introduced to analyze the static behavior of the bending plate. The FSDT is a simple formulation suitable for relatively thick plates, and therefore, when thin plates are considered, the well-known shear locking issue may occur and cause errors in the numerical result.