Equilibrated error estimators for discontinuous Galerkin methods

We consider some diffusion problems in domains of ?^d, d = 2 or 3 approximated by a discontinuous Galerkin method with polynomials of any degree. We propose a new a posteriori error estimator based on H(div)‐conforming elements. It is shown that this estimator gives rise to an upper bound where the constant is one up to higher order terms. The lower bound is also established with a constant depending on the aspect ratio of the mesh, the dependence with respect to the coefficients being also traced. The reliability and efficiency of the proposed estimator is confirmed by some numerical tests. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2008     

A posteriori error estimation of residual type for anisotropic diffusion-convection-reaction problems

This paper presents a robust a posteriori residual error estimator for diffusion-convection-reaction problems with anisotropic diffusion, approximated by a SUPG finite element method on isotropic or anisotropic meshes in R^d, d=2 or 3. The equivalence between the energy norm of the error and the residual error estimator is proved. Numerical tests confirm the theoretical results.     

Superconvergence phenomenon in the finite element method arising from averaging gradients

Summary We study a superconvergence phenomenon which can be obtained when solving a 2^nd order elliptic problem by the usual linear elements. The averaged gradient is a piecewise linear continuous vector field, the value of which at any nodal point is an average of gradients of linear elements on triangles incident with this nodal point. The convergence rate of the averaged gradient to an exact gradient in theL ²-norm can locally be higher even by one than that of the original piecewise constant discrete gradient.     

Parallel domain decomposition procedures of improved D-D type for parabolic problems

Two parallel domain decomposition procedures for solving initial-boundary value problems of parabolic partial differential equations are proposed. One is the extended D-D type algorithm, which extends the explicit/implicit conservative Galerkin domain decomposition procedures, given in [5], from a rectangle domain and its decomposition that consisted of a stripe of sub-rectangles into a general domain and its general decomposition with a net-like structure. An almost optimal error estimate, without the factor H^−1/2 given in Dawson-Dupont’s error estimate, is proved. Another is the parallel domain decomposition algorithm of improved D-D type, in which an additional term is introduced to produce an approximation of an optimal error accuracy in L²-norm.     

Convergence estimates for an higher order optimized Schwarz method for domains with an arbitrary interface

Optimized Schwarz methods form a class of domain decomposition methods for the solution of elliptic partial differential equations. Optimized Schwarz methods employ a first or higher order boundary condition along the artificial interface to accelerate convergence. In the literature, the analysis of optimized Schwarz methods relies on Fourier analysis and so the domains are restricted to be regular (rectangular). In this paper, we express the interface operator of an optimized Schwarz method in terms of Poincare-Steklov operators. This enables us to derive an upper bound of the spectral radius of the operator arising in this method of 1−O(h^1/4) on a class of general domains, where h is the discretization parameter. This is the predicted rate for a second order optimized Schwarz method in the literature on rectangular subdomains and is also the observed rate in numerical simulations.     

A posteriori error estimates for a finite element approximation of transmission problems with sign changing coefficients

We perform the a posteriori error analysis of residual type of transmission problem with sign changing coefficients. According to Bonnet-BenDhia et al. (2010) [9], if the contrast is large enough, the continuous problem can be transformed into a coercive one. We further show that a similar property holds for the discrete problem for any regular meshes, extending the framework from Bonnet-BenDhia et al. [9]. The reliability and efficiency of the proposed estimator are confirmed by some numerical tests.     

A posteriori residual error estimation of a cell-centered finite volume method

We present an a posteriori residual error estimator for the Laplace equation using a cell-centered finite volume method in the plane. For that purpose we associate to the approximated solution a kind of Morley interpolant. The error is then the difference between the exact solution and this Morley interpolant. The residual error estimator is based on the jump of normal and tangential derivatives of the Morley interpolant. The equivalence between the discrete H¹-seminorm of the error and the residual error estimator is proved. The proof of the upper error bound uses the Helmholtz decomposition of the broken gradient of the error and some quasi-orthogonality relations. To cite this article: S. Nicaise, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 338 (2004).     

A posteriori error estimators for nonconforming finite element methods of the linear elasticity problem

In this work we derive and analyze a posteriori error estimators for low-order nonconforming finite element methods of the linear elasticity problem on both triangular and quadrilateral meshes, with hanging nodes allowed for local mesh refinement. First, it is shown that equilibrated Neumann data on interelement boundaries are simply given by the local weak residuals of the numerical solution. The first error estimator is then obtained by applying the equilibrated residual method with this set of Neumann data. From this implicit estimator we also derive two explicit error estimators, one of which is similar to the one proposed by Dörfler and Ainsworth (2005) [24] for the Stokes problem. It is established that all these error estimators are reliable and efficient in a robust way with respect to the Lamé constants. The main advantage of our error estimators is that they yield guaranteed, i.e., constant-free upper bounds for the energy-like error (up to higher order terms due to data oscillation) when a good estimate for the inf-sup constant is available, which is confirmed by some numerical results.     

Nonconforming mixed finite element approximation to the stationary Navier-Stokes equations on anisotropic meshes

The main aim of this paper is to study the error estimates of a rectangular nonconforming finite element for the stationary Navier-Stokes equations under anisotropic meshes. That is, the nonconforming rectangular element is taken as approximation space for the velocity and the piecewise constant element for the pressure. The convergence analysis is presented and the optimal error estimates both in a broken H¹-norm for the velocity and in an L²-norm for the pressure are derived on anisotropic meshes.     

Optimal error estimate and superconvergence of the DG method for first-order hyperbolic problems

We consider the original discontinuous Galerkin method for the first-order hyperbolic problems in d-dimensional space. We show that, when the method uses polynomials of degree k, the L₂-error estimate is of order k+1 provided the triangulation is made of rectangular elements satisfying certain conditions. Further, we show the O(h^2k+1)-order superconvergence for the error on average on some suitably chosen subdomains (including the whole domain) and their outflow faces. Moreover, we also establish a derivative recovery formula for the approximation of the convection directional derivative which is superconvergent with order k+1.     

Error estimates of the lumped mass finite element method for semilinear elliptic problems

We are concerned with the semilinear elliptic problems. We first investigate the L²-error estimate for the lumped mass finite element method. We then use the cascadic multigrid method to solve the corresponding discrete problem. On the basis of the finite element error estimates, we prove the optimality of the proposed multigrid method. We also report some numerical results to support the theory.     

A posteriori error estimators for the first-order least-squares finite element method

In this paper, we propose a posteriori error estimators for certain quantities of interest for a first-order least-squares finite element method. In particular, we propose an a posteriori error estimator for when one is interested in where . Our a posteriori error estimators are obtained by assigning proper weight (in terms of local mesh size h_T) to the terms of the least-squares functional. An a posteriori error analysis yields reliable and efficient estimates based on residuals. Numerical examples are presented to show the effectivity of our error estimators.     

A new a posteriori error estimate for convection–reaction–diffusion problems

A new a posteriori error estimate is derived for the stationary convection–reaction–diffusion equation. In order to estimate the approximation error in the usual energy norm, the underlying bilinear form is decomposed into a computable integral and two other terms which can be estimated from above using elementary tools of functional analysis. Two auxiliary parameter-functions are introduced to construct such a splitting and tune the resulting bound. If these functions are chosen in an optimal way, the exact energy norm of the error is recovered, which proves that the estimate is sharp. The presented methodology is completely independent of the numerical technique used to compute the approximate solution. In particular, it is applicable to approximations which fail to satisfy the Galerkin orthogonality, e.g. due to an inconsistent stabilization, flux limiting, low-order quadrature rules, round-off and iteration errors, etc. Moreover, the only constant that appears in the proposed error estimate is global and stems from the Friedrichs–Poincaré inequality. Numerical experiments illustrate the potential of the proposed error estimation technique.     

An a posteriori error estimator for the Lame equation based on equilibrated fluxes

Katharina Witowski ^{We derive a new a posteriori error estimator for the Lamésystem based on H(div)-conforming elements and equilibratedfluxes. It is shown that the estimator gives rise to an upperbound where the constant is one up to higher-order terms. Thelower bound is also established using Argyris elements. Thereliability and efficiency of the proposed estimator are confirmedby some numerical tests.}     

Two-level additive Schwarz preconditioners for C 0 interior penalty methods

We study two-level additive Schwarz preconditioners that can be used in the iterative solution of the discrete problems resulting from C⁰ interior penalty methods for fourth order elliptic boundary value problems. We show that the condition number of the preconditioned system is bounded by C(1+(H³/δ³)), where H is the typical diameter of a subdomain, δ measures the overlap among the subdomains and the positive constant C is independent of the mesh sizes and the number of subdomains. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DMS-03-11790.     

Asymptotically exact functional error estimators based on superconvergent gradient recovery

The use of dual/adjoint problems for approximating functionals of solutions of PDEs with great accuracy or to merely drive a goal-oriented adaptive refinement scheme has become well-accepted, and it continues to be an active area of research. The traditional approach involves dual residual weighting (DRW). In this work we present two new functional error estimators and give conditions under which we can expect them to be asymptotically exact. The first is of DRW type and is derived for meshes in which most triangles satisfy an -approximate parallelogram property. The second functional estimator involves dual error estimate weighting (DEW) using any superconvergent gradient recovery technique for the primal and dual solutions. Several experiments are done which demonstrate the asymptotic exactness of a DEW estimator which uses a gradient recovery scheme proposed by Bank and Xu, and the effectiveness of refinement done with respect to the corresponding local error indicators. Resubmitted to Numerische Mathematik, June 30, 2005, with changes suggested by referees.     

Shifted lattice rules based on a general weighted discrepancy for integrals over Euclidean space

We approximate weighted integrals over Euclidean space by using shifted rank-1 lattice rules with good bounds on the “generalised weighted star discrepancy”. This version of the discrepancy corresponds to the classic L_∞ weighted star discrepancy via a mapping to the unit cube. The weights here are general weights rather than the product weights considered in earlier works on integrals over R^d. Known methods based on an averaging argument are used to show the existence of these lattice rules, while the component-by-component technique is used to construct the generating vector of these shifted lattice rules. We prove that the bound on the weighted star discrepancy considered here is of order O(n^−1+δ) for any δ>0 and with the constant involved independent of the dimension. This convergence rate is better than the O(n^−1/2) achieved so far for both Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo methods.     

A posteriori estimation of the linearization error for strongly monotone nonlinear operators

We investigate the a posteriori estimation of the modeling (or linearization) error which arises when a nonlinear problem is replaced by a linear model. Using the context of strongly monotone operators, we construct a computable upper estimator for this error, and also provide an estimator that gives a lower bound. Several numerical results illustrating our theory are provided.     

On the asymptotic exactness of error estimators for linear triangular finite elements

Summary This paper deals with a-posteriori error estimates for piecewise linear finite element approximations of elliptic problems. We analyze two estimators based on recovery operators for the gradient of the approximate solution. By using superconvergence results we prove their asymptotic exactness under regularity assumptions on the mesh and the solution.One of the estimators can be easily computed in terms of the jumps of the gradient of the finite element approximation. This estimator is equivalent to the error in the energy norm under rather general conditions. However, we show that for the asymptotic exactness, the regularity assumption on the mesh is not merely technical. While doing this, we analyze the relation between superconvergence and asymptotic exactness for some particular examples.     

Biquadratic finite volume element methods based on optimal stress points for parabolic problems

In this paper, the semi-discrete and full discrete biquadratic finite volume element schemes based on optimal stress points for a class of parabolic problems are presented. Optimal order error estimates in H¹ and L² norms are derived. In addition, the superconvergences of numerical gradients at optimal stress points are also discussed. A numerical experiment confirms some results of theoretical analysis.