Virtual element for the buckling problem of Kirchhoff–Love plates

In this paper, we develop a virtual element method (VEM) of high order to solve the fourth order plate buckling eigenvalue problem on polygonal meshes. We write a variational formulation based on the Kirchhoff–Love model depending on the transverse displacement of the plate. We propose a C1 conforming virtual element discretization of arbitrary order k≥2 and we use the so-called Babuška–Osborn abstract spectral approximation theory to show that the resulting scheme provides a correct approximation of the spectrum and prove optimal order error estimates for the buckling modes (eigenfunctions) and a double order for the buckling coefficients (eigenvalues). Finally, we report some numerical experiments illustrating the behavior of the proposed scheme and confirming our theoretical results on different families of meshes.