An additive average Schwarz method for the plate bending problem

The original additive average Schwarz method and its variants were introduced for solving second order elliptic boundary value problems. In this paper, we extend the original idea to fourth order problems by designing a variant of the additive average Schwarz method for the plate bending problem using the nonconforming Morley finite element for the discretization. Like the original average method this method uses only nonoverlapping subdomains, and its coarse space does not need any explicit coarse mesh. An analysis of the method, and some numerical experiments to validate the theory are presented.