Superconvergence of three dimensional Morley elements on cuboid meshes for biharmonic equations

In the present paper, superconvergence of second order, after an appropriate postprocessing, is achieved for three dimensional first order cuboid Morley elements of biharmonic equations. The analysis is dependent on superconvergence of second order for the consistency error and a corrected canonical interpolation operator, which help to establish supercloseness of second order for the corrected canonical interpolation. Then the final superconvergence is derived by a standard postprocessing. For first order nonconforming finite element methods of three dimensional fourth order elliptic problems, it is the first time that full superconvergence of second order is obtained without an extra boundary condition imposed on exact solutions. It is also the first time that superconvergence is established for nonconforming finite element methods of three dimensional fourth order elliptic problems. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the validity of the theoretical results.