On mortar-type Morley element method for plate bending problem Original Research Article

The purpose of this paper is to consider a mortar element method with locally nonconforming elements for solving plate bending problem. On the subdomains, Morley nonconforming elements are used with different mesh triangulations as desire; at the interfaces two mortar conditions, one for the solution itself in pointwise way, the other for the normal derivative of the solution in the projection way, are given to keep the global convergence of this method. After some detailed analysis, an error estimate in energy norm is obtained, which is optimal in approximation order and only requires the regularity just like that for Morley element method (Arnold and Brezzi (1985), Shi (1990)), namely, View the MathML source.