Unified a priori analysis of four second-order FEM for fourth-order quadratic semilinear problems

A unified framework for fourth-order semilinear problems with trilinear nonlinearity and general sources allows for quasi-best approximation with lowest-order finite element methods. This paper establishes the stability and a priori error control in the piecewise energy and weaker Sobolev norms under minimal hypotheses. Applications include the stream function vorticity formulation of the incompressible 2D Navier-Stokes equations and the von Kármán equations with Morley, discontinuous Galerkin, $$C^{0}$$ C 0 interior penalty, and weakly over-penalized symmetric interior penalty schemes. The proposed new discretizations consider quasi-optimal smoothers for the source term and smoother-type modifications inside the nonlinear terms.