A Nonlocal Biharmonic Operator and its Connection with the Classical Analogue

We consider a singular integral operator as a natural generalization to the biharmonic operator that arises in thin plate theory. The operator is built in the nonlocal calculus framework defined in (Math Models Methods Appl Sci 23(03):493–540, 2013 ) and connects with the recent theory of peridynamics. This framework enables us to consider non-smooth approximations to fourth-order elliptic boundary-value problems. For these systems we introduce nonlocal formulations of the clamped and hinged boundary conditions that are well-defined even for irregular domains. We demonstrate the existence and uniqueness of solutions to these nonlocal problems and demonstrate their L 2 -strong convergence to functions in W 2,2 as the nonlocal interaction horizon goes to zero. For regular domains we identify these limits as the weak solutions of the corresponding classical elliptic boundary-value problems. As a part of our proof we also establish that the nonlocal Laplacian of a smooth function is Lipschitz continuous.