Remarks on partial selective reduced integration method for Reissner-Mindlin plate problem

We deal with the approximation of the Reissner-Mindlin plate problem by means of finite element techniques. We consider a non-standard mixed formulation recently proposed by Arnold and Brezzi. These methods are based on a suitable splitting, depending on a parameter, of the shear energy term into two parts, one of them being exactly integrated, while for the second one a reduced integration formula is used. In this paper we analyse the numerical behaviour of the approximate solution varying the splitting parameter and we propose a recipe for its choice.