A priori and a posteriori error control of discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods for the von Kármán equations

Abstract

This paper analyses discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods (DGFEM) to approximate a regular solution to the von Karman equations defined on a polygonal domain. A discrete inf–sup condition sufficient for the stability of the discontinuous Galerkin discretization of a well-posed linear problem is established, and this allows the proof of local existence and uniqueness of a discrete solution to the nonlinear problem with a Banach fixed point theorem. The Newton scheme is locally second-order convergent and appears to be a robust solution strategy up to machine precision. A comprehensive a priori and a posteriori energy-norm error analysis relies on one sufficiently large stabilization parameter and sufficiently fine triangulations. In case the other stabilization parameter degenerates towards infinity, the DGFEM reduces to a novel C0-interior penalty method (IPDG). In contrast to the known C0-IPDG dueto Brenner et al., (2016, A C0 interior penalty method for a von Karman plate. Numer. Math., 1–30), the overall discrete formulation maintains symmetry of the trilinear form in the first two components—despite the general nonsymmetry of the discrete nonlinear problems. Moreover, a reliable and efficient a posteriori error analysis immediately follows for the DGFEM of this paper, while the different norms in the known C0-IPDG lead to complications with some nonresidual-type remaining terms. Numerical experiments confirm the best-approximation results and the equivalence of the error and the error estimators. A related adaptive mesh-refining algorithm leads to optimal empirical convergence rates for a nonconvex domain.