hp-Version a priori Error Analysis of Interior Penalty Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Approximations to the Biharmonic Equation

We consider the symmetric formulation of the interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for the numerical solution of the biharmonic equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions in a bounded polyhedral domain in . For a shape-regular family of meshes consisting of parallelepipeds, we derive hp-version a priori bounds on the global error measured in the L² norm and in broken Sobolev norms. Using these, we obtain hp-version bounds on the error in linear functionals of the solution. The bounds are optimal with respect to the mesh size h and suboptimal with respect to the degree of the piecewise polynomial approximation p. The theoretical results are confirmed by numerical experiments, and some practical applications in Poisson–Kirchhoff thin plate theory are presented.