| Abstract: | An adaptive refinement strategy for the hp‐version of the boundary element method with hypersingular operators on surfaces is presented. The error indicators are based on local projections provided by two‐level decompositions of ansatz spaces with additional bubble functions. Assuming a saturation property and locally quasi‐uniform meshes, efficiency and reliability of the resulting error estimator is proved. A second error estimator based on mesh refinement and overlapping decompositions that better fulfills the saturation property is presented. The performance of the algorithm and the estimators is demonstrated for a model problem. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 18: 396–419, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/num.10011 |
