DG Approach to Large Bending Plate Deformations with Isometry Constraint

We propose a new discontinuous Galerkin (dG) method for a geometrically nonlinear Kirchhoff plate model for large isometric bending deformations. The minimization problem is nonconvex due to the isometry constraint. We present a practical discrete gradient flow that decreases the energy and computes discrete minimizers that satisfy a prescribed discrete isometry defect. We prove $\Gamma$-convergence of the discrete energies and discrete global minimizers. We document the flexibility and accuracy of the dG method with several numerical experiments.