The superconvergent patch recovery and <i>a posteriori</i> error estimates. Part 1: The recovery technique

Abstract This is the first of two papers concerning superconvergent recovery techniques and a posteriori error estimation. In this paper, a general recovery technique is developed for determining the derivatives (stresses) of the finite element solutions at nodes. The implementation of the recovery technique is simple and cost effective. The technique has been tested for a group of widely used linear, quadratic and cubic elements for both one and two dimensional problems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the recovered nodal values of the derivatives with linear and cubic elements are superconvergent. One order higher accuracy is achieved by the procedure with linear and cubic elements but two order higher accuracy is achieved for the derivatives with quadratic elements. In particular, an O ( h 4 ) convergence of the nodal values of the derivatives for a quadratic triangular element is reported for the first time. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with the widely used smoothing procedure of global L 2 projection and other methods. It is found that the derivatives recovered at interelement nodes, by using L 2 projection, are also superconvergent for linear elements but not for quadratic elements. Numerical experiments on the convergence of the recovered solutions in the energy norm are also presented. Higher rates of convergence are again observed. The results presented in this part of the paper indicate clearly that a new, powerful and economical process is now available which should supersede the currently used post‐processing procedures applied in most codes.