A posteriori error estimates of two-grid finite element methods for nonlinear elliptic problems (Q1703049)

Two grid finite element methods are based on two finite spaces \(S_H\) and \(S_h\) (on the coarse grid \(H\) and the fine grid \(h\)). The standard finite element method is used to solve the nonlinear problems on the coarse space \(S_H\) to obtain a rough approximation \(u_H\), next a linearized problem on the fine grid is solved to get a corrected solution \(u_h\). The authors note that the space \(S_H\) can be extremely coarse, compared with \(S_h\), to still maintain the optimal accuracy on the fine space and that solving a nonlinear equation is not much more difficult than solving a linear equation. The authors consider the two-grid finite element methods for second order nonlinear elliptic boundary value problems and establish computable upper and lower error bounds in the \(H^1\)-norm. They propose two computationally easy residual-based \textit{a posteriori} error estimators of the two-grid finite element methods and develop global upper and lower error bounds in the \(H^1\)-norm. The paper concludes with results of numerical experiments to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimators.