Vibration analysis of Kirchhoff plates by the Morley element method

Vibration analysis of Kirchhoff plates is of great importance in many engineering fields. The semi-discrete and the fully discrete Morley element methods are proposed to solve such a problem, which are effective even when the region of interest is irregular. The rigorous error estimates in the energy norm for both methods are established. Some reasonable approaches to choosing the initial functions are given to keep the good convergence rate of the fully discrete method. A number of numerical results are provided to illustrate the computational performance of the method in this paper.