“…FEM's accuracy is strongly related to the suitable quality of the generated mesh that, in the case of VAT laminates, due to the variation of the in-plane and through-the-thickness properties, generally indices a high number of mesh elements, thus leading to high computational efforts [4,5]. To overcome such issues, and possibly speed up the analysis still retaining a high level of accuracy, different numerical techniques have been proposed as alternative to FEM, such as boundary elements methods [6,7,8] or mesh-less techniques [9]; in this context, the Ritz method, which may be seen as a global mesh-less technique, has been often shown effective for the analysis of classical, laminated and VAT composite structures [10,11,12,13].…”