Search for: All records

Abstract A local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for approximating large deformations of prestrained plates is introduced and tested on several insightful numerical examples in Bonito et al. (2022, LDG approximation of large deformations of prestrained plates. J. Comput. Phys., 448, 110719). This paper presents a numerical analysis of this LDG method, focusing on the free boundary case. The problem consists of minimizing a fourth-order bending energy subject to a nonlinear and nonconvex metric constraint. The energy is discretized using LDG and a discrete gradient flow is used for computing discrete minimizers. We first show $$\varGamma $$-convergence of the discrete energy to the continuous one. Then we prove that the discrete gradient flow decreases the energy at each step and computes discrete minimizers with control of the metric constraint defect. We also present a numerical scheme for initialization of the gradient flow and discuss the conditional stability of it. 

Abstract An interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method is devised to approximate minimizers of a linear folding model by discontinuous isoparametric finite element functions that account for an approximation of a folding arc. The numerical analysis of the discrete model includes an a priori error estimate in case of an accurate representation of the folding curve by the isoparametric mesh. Additional estimates show that geometric consistency errors may be controlled separately if the folding arc is approximated by piecewise polynomial curves. Various numerical experiments are carried out to validate the a priori error estimate for the folding model.