HIGHLY NONCONFORMING FINITE ELEMENT APPROXIMATIONS FOR A FOURTH ORDER VARIATIONAL INEQUALITY WITH CURVATURE OBSTACLE

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to obtain the optimal error estimates of O(h) for the highly nonconforming elements to a fourth order variational inequality with curvature obstacle in a convex domain with simply supported boundary by using the novel function splitting method and the orthogonal properties of the nonconforming finite element spaces. Morley's element approximation is our special case.