Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for the Biharmonic Problem on Polygonal and Polyhedral Meshes

Abstract: We introduce an $hp$-version symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (DGFEM) for the numerical approximation of the biharmonic equation on general computational meshes consisting of polygonal/polyhedral (polytopic) elements. In particular, the stability and $hp$-version a-priori error bound are derived based on the specific choice of the interior penalty parameters which allows for edges/faces degeneration. Furthermore, by deriving a new inverse inequality for a special class {of} polynomial functions (harmonic polynomials), the proposed DGFEM is proven to be stable to incorporate very general polygonal/polyhedral elements with an \emph{arbitrary} number of faces for polynomial basis with degree $p=2,3$. The key feature of the proposed method is that it employs elemental polynomial bases of total degree $\mathcal{P}_p$, defined in the physical coordinate system, without requiring the mapping from a given reference or canonical frame. A series of numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed DGFEM on general polygonal/polyhedral meshes.