The embedded discontinuous Galerkin method: application to linear shell problems

A new discontinuous Galerkin method for elliptic problems which is capable of rendering the same set of unknowns in the final system of equations as for the continuous displacement-based Galerkin method is presented. Those equations are obtained by the assembly of element matrices whose structure in particular cases is also identical to that of the continuous displacement approach. This makes the present formulation easily implementable within the existing commercial computer codes. The proposed approach is named the embedded discontinuous Galerkin method. It is applicable to any system of linear partial differential equations but it is presented here in the context of linear elasticity. An application of the method to linear shell problems is then outlined and numerical results are presented. Copyright q 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.