An Extension of the Morley Element on General Polytopal Partitions Using Weak Galerkin Methods

This paper introduces an extension of the well-known Morley element for the biharmonic equation, extending its application from triangular elements to general polytopal elements using the weak Galerkin finite element methods. By leveraging the Schur complement of the weak Galerkin method, this extension not only preserves the same degrees of freedom as the Morley element on triangular elements but also expands its applicability to general polytopal elements. The numerical scheme is devised by locally constructing weak tangential derivatives and weak second-order partial derivatives. Error estimates for the numerical approximation are established in both the energy norm and the \(L^2\) norm. A series of numerical experiments are conducted to validate the theoretical developments.