Abstract: | A projected-shear finite element method for periodic Reissner–Mindlin plate model are analyzed for rectangular meshes. A projection operator is applied to the shear stress term in the bilinear form. Optimal error estimates in the L2-norm, the H1-norm, and the energy norm for both displacement and rotations are established and gradient superconvergence along the Gauss lines is justified in some weak senses. All the convergence and superconvergence results are uniform with respect to the thickness parameter t. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 14: 367–386, 1998 |