Hourglass stabilization and the virtual element method

Summary In this paper, we establish the connections between the virtual element method (VEM) and the hourglass control techniques that have been developed since the early 1980s to stabilize underintegrated C 0 Lagrange finite element methods. In the VEM, the bilinear form is decomposed into two parts: a consistent term that reproduces a given polynomial space and a correction term that provides stability. The essential ingredients of ‐continuous...