A C0 interior penalty method for mth-Laplace equation

In this paper, we propose a C0 interior penalty method for mth-Laplace equation on bounded Lipschitz polyhedral domain in ℝd, where m and d can be any positive integers. The standard H1-conforming piecewise r-th order polynomial space is used to approximate the exact solution u, where r can be any integer greater than or equal to m. Unlike the interior penalty method in Gudi and Neilan [IMA J. Numer. Anal. 31 (2011) 1734–1753], we avoid computing Dm of numerical solution on each element and high order normal derivatives of numerical solution along mesh interfaces. Therefore our method can be easily implemented. After proving discrete Hm-norm bounded by the natural energy semi-norm associated with our method, we manage to obtain stability and optimal convergence with respect to discrete Hm-norm. The error estimate under the low regularity assumption of the exact solution is also obtained. Numerical experiments validate our theoretical estimate.