Cut Bogner-Fox-Schmit elements for plates

Abstract

We present and analyze a method for thin plates based on cut Bogner-Fox-Schmit elements, which are $$C^1$$C1 elements obtained by taking tensor products of Hermite splines. The formulation is based on Nitsche’s method for weak enforcement of essential boundary conditions together with addition of certain stabilization terms that enable us to establish coercivity and stability of the resulting system of linear equations. We also take geometric approximation of the boundary into account and we focus our presentation on the simply supported boundary conditions which is the most sensitive case for geometric approximation of the boundary.