Object-Oriented Programming in Field Recovery and Error Estimation

This paper considers an object-oriented implementation of a generic program module for field recovery and recovery-based error estimation. The field recovery is based on the superconvergent patch recovery technique by Zienkiewicz and Zhu. The current implementation is problem independent, and is organized as a set of C++ classes based on the software library Diffpack. The program may be run stand-alone as a postprocessor, reading finite element data and results from ASCII files. Alternatively, it may be linked into existing simulation codes through a FORTRAN interface, thereby enabling error estimation within the time-step loop of a transient simulation. The use of the field recovery and error estimation module is demonstrated on a isotropic linear elastic problem with known analytical solution, such that also the exact error, and not only the estimated error, may be computed. The computational efficiency of the object-oriented module is assessed by comparing the time consumption with..