A new C0 discontinuous Galerkin method for Kirchhoff

Abstract. A general framework of constructing C0 discontinuous Galerkin (CDG) methods is developed for solving the Kirchhoff plate bending prob-lem, following some ideas in [10, 12]. The numerical traces are determined based on a discrete stability identity, which lead to a class of stable CDG methods. A stable CDGmethod, called the LCDGmethod, is particularly interesting in our study. It can be viewed as an extension to fourth-order problems of the LDG method studied in [10, 12]. For this method, optimal order error estimates in certain broken energy norm and H1-norm are es-tablished. Some numerical results are reported, confirming the theoretical convergence orders