A posteriori error analysis for the Morley plate element with general boundary conditions

This paper introduces and analyses a local. residual-based a posteriori error indicator for the Morley finite element method of the biharmonic Kirchhoff plate bending problem. In the theoretical part of the paper, a recent approach presented by the authors for clamped boundaries is extended to general boundary conditions. The error indicator is proven to be both reliable and efficient. The numerical part of the paper presents a set of results on various benchmark computations with different kinds of domains and boundary conditions. These tests verify the reliability and efficiency of the error estimator and illustrate the robustness of the method for adaptive mesh refinements. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons. Ltd.