Two Efficient and Reliable a posteriori Error Estimates for the Local Discontinuous Galerkin Method Applied to Linear Elliptic Problems on Cartesian Grids

Abstract

In this paper, we derive two a posteriori error estimates for the local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method applied to linear second-order elliptic problems on Cartesian grids. We first prove that the gradient of the LDG solution is superconvergent with order $$p+1$$ towards the gradient of Gauss-Radau projection of the exact solution, when tensor product polynomials of degree at most p are used. Then, we prove that the gradient of the actual error can be split into two parts. The components of the significant part can be given in terms of $$(p+1)$$ -degree Radau polynomials. We use these results to construct a reliable and efficient residual-type a posteriori error estimates. We further develop a postprocessing gradient recovery scheme for the LDG solution. This recovered gradient superconverges to the gradient of the true solution. The order of convergence is proved to be $$p+1$$ . We use our gradient recovery result to develop a robust recovery-type a posteriori error estimator for the gradient approximation which is based on an enhanced recovery technique. We prove that the proposed residual-type and recovery-type a posteriori error estimates converge to the true errors in the $$L^2$$ -norm under mesh refinement. The order of convergence is proved to be $$p + 1$$ . Moreover, the proposed estimators are proved to be asymptotically exact. Finally, we present a local adaptive mesh refinement procedure that makes use of our local and global a posteriori error estimates. Our proofs are valid for arbitrary regular meshes and for $$P^p$$ polynomials with $$p\ge 1$$ . We provide several numerical examples illustrating the effectiveness of our procedures.