Mixed finite elements for Kirchhoff-Love plate bending

Abstract: We present a mixed finite element method with triangular and parallelogram meshes for the Kirchhoff-Love plate bending model. Critical ingredient is the construction of low-dimensional local spaces and appropriate degrees of freedom that provide conformity in terms of a sufficiently large tensor space and that allow for any kind of physically relevant Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. For Dirichlet boundary conditions and polygonal plates, we prove quasi-optimal convergence of the mixed scheme. An a posteriori error estimator is derived for the special case of the biharmonic problem. Numerical results for regular and singular examples illustrate our findings. They confirm expected convergence rates and exemplify the performance of an adaptive algorithm steered by our error estimator.