Weakly symmetric stress equilibration and a posteriori error estimation for linear elasticity

A stress equilibration procedure for linear elasticity is proposed and analyzed in this paper with emphasis on the behavior for (nearly) incompressible materials. Based on the displacement-pressure approximation computed with a stable finite element pair, it constructs an $H (\text{div})$-conforming, weakly symmetric stress reconstruction. Our focus is on the Taylor-Hood combination of continuous finite element spaces of polynomial degrees $k+1$ and $k$ for the displacement and the pressure, respectively. Our construction leads then to reconstructed stresses by Raviart-Thomas elements of degree $k$ which are weakly symmetric in the sense that its anti-symmetric part is zero tested against continuous piecewise polynomial functions of degree $k$. The computation is performed locally on a set of vertex patches covering the computational domain in the spirit of equilibration \cite{BraSch:08}. Due to the weak symmetry constraint, the local problems need to satisfy consistency conditions associated with all rigid body modes, in contrast to the case of Poisson's equation where only the constant modes are involved. The resulting error estimator is shown to constitute a guaranteed upper bound for the error with a constant that depends only on the shape regularity of the triangulation. Local efficiency, uniformly in the incompressible limit, is deduced from the upper bound by the residual error estimator

Fully computable a posteriori error bounds for hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin finite element approximations

We derive a posteriori error estimates for the hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) methods, including both the primal and mixed formulations, for the approximation of a linear second-order elliptic problem on conforming simplicial meshes in two and three dimensions. We obtain fully computable, constant free, a posteriori error bounds on the broken energy seminorm and the HDG energy (semi)norm of the error. The estimators are also shown to provide local lower bounds for the HDG energy (semi)norm of the error up to a constant and a higher-order data oscillation term. For the primal HDG methods and mixed HDG methods with an appropriate choice of stabilization parameter, the estimators are also shown to provide a lower bound for the broken energy seminorm of the error up to a constant and a higher-order data oscillation term. Numerical examples are given illustrating the theoretical results

Refined a posteriori error estimation for classical and pressure-robust Stokes finite element methods

Recent works showed that pressure-robust modifications of mixed finite element methods for the Stokes equations outperform their standard versions in many cases. This is achieved by divergence-free reconstruction operators and results in pressure independent velocity error estimates which are robust with respect to small viscosities. In this paper we develop a posteriori error control which reflects this robustness. The main difficulty lies in the volume contribution of the standard residual-based approach that includes the $L^2$-norm of the right-hand side. However, the velocity is only steered by the divergence-free part of this source term. An efficient error estimator must approximate this divergence-free part in a proper manner, otherwise it can be dominated by the pressure error. To overcome this difficulty a novel approach is suggested that uses arguments from the stream function and vorticity formulation of the Navier--Stokes equations. The novel error estimators only take the $\mathrm{curl}$ of the right-hand side into account and so lead to provably reliable, efficient and pressure-independent upper bounds in case of a pressure-robust method in particular in pressure-dominant situations. This is also confirmed by some numerical examples with the novel pressure-robust modifications of the Taylor--Hood and mini finite element methods

Adjoint-Based Error Estimation and Mesh Adaptation for Hybridized Discontinuous Galerkin Methods

We present a robust and efficient target-based mesh adaptation methodology, building on hybridized discontinuous Galerkin schemes for (nonlinear) convection-diffusion problems, including the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. Hybridization of finite element discretizations has the main advantage, that the resulting set of algebraic equations has globally coupled degrees of freedom only on the skeleton of the computational mesh. Consequently, solving for these degrees of freedom involves the solution of a potentially much smaller system. This not only reduces storage requirements, but also allows for a faster solution with iterative solvers. The mesh adaptation is driven by an error estimate obtained via a discrete adjoint approach. Furthermore, the computed target functional can be corrected with this error estimate to obtain an even more accurate value. The aim of this paper is twofold: Firstly, to show the superiority of adjoint-based mesh adaptation over uniform and residual-based mesh refinement, and secondly to investigate the efficiency of the global error estimate