摘要:The need to perform computations on irregularly distributed nets of nodes arises in many applications of solid and fluid computational mechanics. This is specially problematic in three dimensions. Typically, the finite element method with tetrahedral elements is used for such purpose. However, this poses a number of problems. On one hand some elements are considerably distorted – with eventually some null-volume elements – leading to poor solutions. Also, in this method only h-refinement is feasible so that solution improvement demands to refine the mesh. In this work we describe a meshless method which we designate as Functional Integral Method (FIM) based on the use of blurred derivatives, that allows to overcome the above mentioned difficulties. The method only requires the connectivity of each node given by first neighbors (Voronoi cells) for discretization yielding the same structure of non-zeros as FEM with tetrahedral elements. The matrix is nevertheless non-symmetric so that storage and solution of the linear system increases by a factor close to two. However, results of several numerical simulations indicate that the error is systematically much smaller than with FEM and it is rather insensitive to node irregularity so that relation cost-benefit is finally enhanced substantially. Also, it allows to perform p-refinement in a trivial manner by just adding more neighbors to the local cloud of each node thus increasing the order of interpolation. In this way the error can be further reduced without re-meshing