A new C 0 discontinuous Galerkin method for Kirchhoff plates

A general framework of constructing C 0 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 CDG method, called the LCDG method, 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 H 1 -norm are es- tablished. Some numerical results are reported, confirming the theoretical convergence orders.