Superconvergence of both two and three dimensional rectangular Morley elements for biharmonic equations

Abstract: In the present paper, superconvergence of second order, after an appropriate postprocessing, is achieved for both the two and three dimensional first order rectangular Morley elements of biharmonic equations. The analysis is dependent on superconvergence of second order for the consistency error and a corrected canonical interpolation operator, which help to establish supercloseness of second order for the corrected canonical interpolation. Then the final superconvergence follows a standard postprocessing. For first order nonconforming finite element methods of both two and three dimensional fourth order elliptic problems, it is the first time that full superconvergence of second order is obtained without an extra boundary condition imposed on exact solutions. It is also the first time that superconvergence is established for nonconforming finite element methods of three dimensional fourth order elliptic problems. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the theoretical results.