We show that certain integral curvature energies on surfaces have discrete versions for triangular complexes, where the shape operator is replaced by the piecewise gradient of a piecewise affine edge director field. We combine an ansatz-free asymptotic lower bound for any uniform approximation of a surface with triangular complexes and a recovery sequence consisting of any regular triangulation of the limit sequence and an almost optimal choice of edge director.
Gladbach, P., & Olbermann, H. (2023). Consistent and convergent discretizations of Helfrich-type energies on general meshes. arxiv.org. Submitted. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/236500 (Original work published 2023)