Lower-order equivalent nonstandard finite element methods for biharmonic plates

The popular (piecewise) quadratic schemes for the biharmonic equation based on triangles are the nonconforming Morley finite element, the discontinuous Galerkin, the C0 interior penalty, and the WOPSIP schemes. Those methods are modified in their right-hand side and then are quasi-optimal in their respective discrete norms. The smoother JI M is defined for a piecewise smooth input function by a (generalized) Morley interpolation I M followed by a companion operator J. An abstract framework for the error analysis in the energy, weaker and piecewise Sobolev norms for the schemes is outlined and applied to the biharmonic equation. Three errors are also equivalent in some particular discrete norm from [Carstensen, Gallistl, Nataraj: Comparison results of nonstandard P 2 finite element methods for the biharmonic problem, ESAIM Math. Model. Numer. Anal. (2015)] without data oscillations. This paper extends and unifies the work [Veeser, Zanotti: Quasioptimal nonconforming methods for symmetric elliptic problems, SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 56 (2018)] to the discontinuous Galerkin scheme and adds error estimates in weaker and piecewise Sobolev norms.

A quasi-optimal variant of the hybrid high-order method for elliptic partial differential equations with H−1 loads

Hybrid high-order (HHO) methods for elliptic diffusion problems have been originally formulated for loads in the Lebesgue space $L^2(\varOmega )$. In this paper we devise and analyse a variant thereof, which is defined for any load in the dual Sobolev space $H^{-1}(\varOmega )$. The main feature of the present variant is that its $H^1$-norm error can be bounded only in terms of the $H^1$-norm best error in a space of broken polynomials. We establish this estimate with the help of recent results on the quasi-optimality of nonconforming methods. We prove also an improved error bound in the $L^2$-norm by duality. Compared to previous works on quasi-optimal nonconforming methods the main novelties are that HHO methods handle pairs of unknowns and not a single function and, more crucially, that these methods employ a reconstruction that is one polynomial degree higher than the discrete unknowns. The proposed modification affects only the formulation of the discrete right-hand side. This is obtained by properly mapping discrete test functions into $H^1_0(\varOmega )$.

GRADIENT SCHEMES: A GENERIC FRAMEWORK FOR THE DISCRETISATION OF LINEAR, NONLINEAR AND NONLOCAL ELLIPTIC AND PARABOLIC EQUATIONS

Gradient schemes are nonconforming methods written in discrete variational formulation and based on independent approximations of functions and gradients, using the same degrees of freedom. Previous works showed that several well-known methods fall in the framework of gradient schemes. Four properties, namely coercivity, consistency, limit-conformity and compactness, are shown in this paper to be sufficient to prove the convergence of gradient schemes for linear and nonlinear elliptic and parabolic problems, including the case of nonlocal operators arising for example in image processing. We also show that the schemes of the Hybrid Mimetic Mixed family, which include in particular the Mimetic Finite Difference schemes, may be seen as gradient schemes meeting these four properties, and therefore converges for the class of above-mentioned problems.

Lower Bounds for Eigenvalues of the Stokes Operator

In this paper, we propose a condition that can guarantee the lower bound property of the discrete eigenvalue produced by the finite element method for the Stokes operator. We check and prove this condition for four nonconforming methods and one conforming method. Hence they produce eigenvalues which are smaller than their exact counterparts.