Energy-norm and balanced-norm supercloseness error analysis of a finite volume method on Shishkin meshes for singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion problems (Q6073867)

The authors consider a singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion problem posed on the unit square in \(\mathbb{R}^2\). A finite volume element method whose primal mesh is Shishkin is constructed. The approximate solution is piecewise bilinear on the primal mesh. A superclose result in the energy norm, for the difference between the approximate solution and the Lagrange interpolant of the exact solution, is derived. This result yields an improved bound for the \(L^2\) error estimate. This also implies that a simple postprocessing of the finite volume solution produces (in the energy norm) a higher-order approximation of the true solution. An analysis for errors in a balanced norm that is stronger than the energy norm is also provided. Using a new approximant of the exact solution from the stated piecewise bilinear space, the authors prove an optimal-order error bound and an associated supercloseness result showing that the difference between the approximate solution and the new approximant is of higher order than the error itself. Some numerical tests are presented to support the theoretical results. The article is interesting and it merits to be read.