Copyright © 2012 L. Jones Tarcius Doss and A. P. Nandini. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

A quadrature-based mixed Petrov-Galerkin finite element method is applied to a fourth-order linear ordinary differential equation. After employing a splitting technique, a cubic spline trial space and a piecewise linear test space are considered in the method. The integrals are then replaced by the Gauss quadrature rule in the formulation itself. Optimal order a priori error estimates are obtained without any restriction on the mesh.