Normal-normal continuous symmetric stresses in mixed finite element elasticity (Q7001222)

The authors study symmetric stress approximations of lower polynomial order in mixed finite element formulation of linear planar elasticity, which are only possible when their div-conformity is weakened to the continuity of normal-normal components. In the 2D case, this condition is meant pointwise along edges for piecewise polynomials. In this paper, the authors introduce such a space and establish a continuous mixed formulation for 2D linear elasticity with pointwise symmetric stresses that have, in a distributional sense, continuous normal-normal components across the edges of a shape-regular triangulation. The displacement is split into an \(L^2\) field and a tangential trace on the skeleton of the mesh. Using a duality lemma relating the normal-normal continuous stresses with the tangential traces of displacements, the authors establish the well-posedness of the new mixed formulation. Then, the authors propose a lowest order approximation on triangular meshes that consists of piecewise quadratic symmetric stress tensors with continuous linear normal-normal traces and discontinuous piecewise linear displacements. The tangential displacement trace acts as a Lagrange multiplier and guarantees global div-conformity in the limit as the mesh-size tends to zero. Moreover, the authors prove locking-free, quasi-optimal convergence of the proposed scheme and illustrate this with numerical examples.