Necessary and sufficient conditions for avoiding Babuška’s paradox on simplicial meshes

Abstract It is shown that discretizations based on variational or weak formulations of the plate bending problem with simple support boundary conditions do not lead to the failure of convergence when polygonal domain approximations are used and the imposed boundary conditions are compatible with the nodal interpolation of the restriction of certain regular functions to approximating domains. It is further shown that this is optimal in the sense that a full realization of the boundary conditions leads to failure of convergence for conforming methods. The abstract conditions imply that standard nonconforming and discontinuous Galerkin methods converge correctly while conforming methods require a suitable relaxation of the boundary condition. The results are confirmed by numerical experiments.