Local and pollution error estimation for finite element approximations of elliptic boundary value problems (Q2564260)

The local elementwise error estimation of finite element approximations of elliptic boundary value problems is presented. The local elementwise error is characterized as a sum of local and pollution error components, and is further characterized explicitly in terms of residual functionals. The pollution error component is presented as a sum of direct and indirect pollution parts. Two algorithms to estimate the pollution error locally are proposed, in which local element residual method type error estimates are employed. Various errors and error indicators in an energy norm for model problems are computed and compared. The numerical results demonstrate that inclusion of a pollution error component in the local error estimation is necessary in order to obtain reliable local error estimates as well as the proposed local pollution error estimators can give reasonable estimates for the pollution error component.