Static and Free‐Vibration Analysis of Shallow Sandwich Shells by a Layerwise Shear Deformation Theory and a Hybrid FEM–PHS–RBF–FD Discretization

We present a finite element formulation for the analysis of doubly curved shallow sandwich and laminated shells in the Donnell–Mushtaq–Vlasov sense. As a new endevor, we consider a new hybrid method, where the mid‐surface geometry is meshed with , , or quadrilaterals, and the first derivatives needed at the integration points come from local polyharmonic‐spline radial‐basis‐function finite differences (PHS–RBF–FD). Static and free vibration examples show that this new method is highly accurate.