A recovery based linear finite element method for 1D bi-harmonic problems (Q2631057)

This paper is the first in a series of articles studying applications of the gradient recovery technique in numerical algorithms to solve high-order partial differential equations. The paper is concerned with the problem that linear \(C^0\) finite elements cannot directly be used to solve higher than second-order differential equations. This is because in a variational formulation second-order derivatives appear, which do not exist for approximations with piecewise linear elements. However, especially in high dimensions, higher-order elements are more challenging to construct which makes the application of piecewise linear elements more attractive. As a remedy the authors propose to replace some derivatives by a the gradient recovery operator, which produces piecewise linear and continuous derivatives of the finite element approximations. Error bounds and convergence properties are analyzed and numerical experiments are provided that support the theoretical results.