Summary: DOI: 10.1007/s10915-004-4134-8
Journal of Scientific Computing, Volumes 22 and 23, June 2005 (© 2005)
A Family of Discontinuous Galerkin Finite
Elements for the Reissner­Mindlin Plate
Douglas N. Arnold,1 Franco Brezzi,2 and L. Donatella Marini3
Received October 6, 2003; accepted (in revised form) April 23, 2004
We develop a family of locking-free elements for the Reissner­Mindlin plate
using Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) techniques, one for each odd degree, and
prove optimal error estimates. A second family uses conforming elements for
the rotations and nonconforming elements for the transverse displacement, gen-
eralizing the element of Arnold and Falk to higher degree.
KEY WORDS: Discontinuous Galerkin; Reissner­Mindlin plates; locking-free
finite elements.
1. INTRODUCTION
Recently there has been a considerable interest in the development of
Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for elliptic problems (see, for
instance, [4] and the references therein). Although their practical interest
is still under investigation, it is clear that the DG approach often implies
a different way of dealing with the problem, that can sometimes lead to
new conforming or nonconforming finite elements that would have been

Source: Arnold, Douglas N. - School of Mathematics, University of Minnesota

Collections: Mathematics