An ultra-weak three-field finite element formulation for the biharmonic and extended Fisher--Kolmogorov equations

This paper discusses a so-called ultra-weak three-field formulation of the biharmonic problem where the solution, its gradient, and an additional Lagrange multiplier are the three unknowns. We establish the well-posedness of the problem using the abstract theory for saddle-point problems, and develop a conforming finite element scheme based on Raviart–Thomas discretisations of the two auxiliary variables. The well-posedness of the discrete formulation and the corresponding a priori error estimate are proved using a discrete inf-sup condition. We further extend the analysis to the time-dependent semilinear equation, namely extended Fisher–Kolmogorov equation. We present a few numerical examples to demonstrate the performance of our approach.