A new discontinuous Galerkin method for Kirchhoff–Love shells

Discontinuous Galerkin methods (DG) have particular appeal in problems involving high-order derivatives since they provide a means of weakly enforcing the continuity of the unknown-field derivatives. This paper proposes a new discontinuous Galerkin method for Kirchhoff–Love shells considering only the membrane and bending response. The proposed one-field method utilizes the weak enforcement in such a way that the displacements are the only unknowns, while the rotation continuity is weakly enforced. This work presents the formulation of the new discontinuous Galerkin method for linear elastic shells, demonstrates the consistency and stability of the proposed framework, and establishes the method’s convergence rate. After a description of the formulation implementation into a finite-element code, these properties are demonstrated on numerical applications.