All first-order averaging techniques for a posteriori finite element error control on unstructured grids are efficient and reliable

All first-order averaging or gradient-recovery operators for lowest-order finite element methods are shown to allow for an efficient a posteriori error estimation in an isotropic, elliptic model problem in a bounded Lipschitz domain in . Given a piecewise constant discrete flux (that is the gradient of a discrete displacement) as an approximation to the unknown exact flux (that is the gradient of the exact displacement), recent results verify efficiency and reliability of

in the sense that is a lower and upper bound of the flux error up to multiplicative constants and higher-order terms. The averaging space consists of piecewise polynomial and globally continuous finite element functions in components with carefully designed boundary conditions. The minimal value is frequently replaced by some averaging operator applied within a simple post-processing to . The result provides a reliable error bound with .

This paper establishes and so equivalence of and . This implies efficiency of for a large class of patchwise averaging techniques which includes the ZZ-gradient-recovery technique. The bound established for tetrahedral finite elements appears striking in that the shape of the elements does not enter: The equivalence is robust with respect to anisotropic meshes. The main arguments in the proof are Ascoli's lemma, a strengthened Cauchy inequality, and elementary calculations with mass matrices.