Approaches for adjoint-based a posteriori analysis of stabilized finite element methods (Q2875005)

The authors are concerned with the adjoint of the stabilized finite element formulation and observe that it is difficult to approximate due to the stability issues. Consequently, they introduce and analyze an alternative approach which stabilizes a variational formulation of the formal adjoint operator. Moreover, they prove that the additional terms that come into the error representation are either computable or negligible. Actually, for a nonlinear system of partial differential equations, they state the adjoint of the stabilized forward (original) operator (AofS) as well as the stabilized variational formulation of the formal adjoint (SofA). Then, they use these adjoints to obtain three different error representations. In case of linear problems, all three errors representations provide exact expressions for the error in a linear functional of the solution. However, they prove numerically that SofA approach provides better error estimates for a specified computational cost. As examples of partial differential equations they take into account a convection-diffusion equation and the Stokes and Navier-Stokes systems, the latter at low Reynolds numbers.