Copyright © 2013 Xuehai Huang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Based on stress-deflection variational formulation, we propose a family of local projection-based stabilized mixed finite element methods for Kirchhoff plate bending problems. According to the error equations, we obtain the error estimates of the approximation to stress tensor in energy norm. And by duality argument, error estimates of the approximation to deflection in H¹-norm are achieved. Then we design an a posteriori error estimator which is closely related to the equilibrium equation, constitutive equation, and nonconformity of the finite element spaces. With the help of Zienkiewicz-Guzmán-Neilan element spaces, we prove the reliability of the a posteriori error estimator. And the efficiency of the a posteriori error estimator is proved by standard bubble function argument.