Global superconvergence for blending surfaces by boundary penalty plus hybrid FEMs (Q5948560)

This paper pursues a series of studies initiated by the first author to obtain accurate approximations of biharmonic equations and of 3D blending surfaces. They use bi-cubic Hermite finite elements and they obtain global convergence properties and improvements of numerical stability. In order to satisfy the normal derivative boundary conditions, they employ boundary penalty plus hybrid integral methods. Error estimates are carefully proved and corresponding results are illustrated by relevant numerical experiments.