Interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method on very general polygonal and polyhedral meshes

This paper provides a theoretical foundation for interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin methods for second-order elliptic equations on very general polygonal or polyhedral meshes. The mesh can be composed of any polygons or polyhedra that satisfy certain shape regularity conditions characterized in a recent paper by two of the authors, Wang and Ye (2012) [11]. The usual H1-conforming finite element methods on such meshes are either very complicated or impossible to implement in practical computation. The interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method provides a simple and effective alternative approach which is efficient and robust. Results with such general meshes have important application in computational sciences.