A Family of Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Elements for the Reissner-Mindlin Plate

We develop a family of locking-free elements for the Reissner– Mindlin plate using Discontinuous Galerkin techniques, one for each odd degree, and prove optimal error estimates. A second family uses conforming elements for the rotations and nonconforming elements for the transverse displacement, generalizing the element of Arnold and Falk to higher degree.