Abstract: | A posteriori error estimates for semidiscrete finite element methods for a nonlinear Sobolev equation are considered. The error estimates are obtained by solving local nonlinear or linear pseudo‐parabolic equations for corrections to the solution on each element. The ratios of these estimates and the true errors are proved to converge to 1, implying that the estimates can be used as indicators in adaptive schemes for the problem. Numerical results underline our theoretical results. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2005 |