A nonconforming weak residual error estimator for elliptic partial differential equations

Abstract

A nonconforming weak residual error estimator is presented and analyzed for finite element solutions of linear elliptic partial differential equations. The treatment of the flux jumps across element edges is of special interest. The estimator is obtained by solving local residual problems which do not explicitly involve the jumps and do not require boundary conditions. The estimator handles both interior and edge residuals on each element by a suitable construction of the basis functions for the local problems. Together with the previous conforming estimator, the weak residual error estimation, without the flux jumps, can thus be applied to both odd- and even-order finite element approximations.