On the Penalty term for the Mixed Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method for the Biharmonic Equation

Abstract

In this paper, we present a study on the effect of penalty term in the mixed Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method for the biharmonic equation proposed by \cite{gudi2008mixed}. The proposed mixed Discontinuous Galerkin Method showed sub-optimal rates of convergence for piecewise quadratic elements and no significant convergence rates for piecewise linear elements. We show that by choosing the penalty term proportional to $|e_k|^{-1}$ instead of $|e_k|^{-3}$, ensures an optimal rate of convergence for the approximation, including for piecewise linear elements. Finally, we present numerical experiments to validate our theoretical results.