(QoIs) such as, for example, the maximum and minimum values of u or In this section we will use the a priori estimates described in Section 1.5.2 to obtain a posteriori estimates of error in energy norm. It is possible to obtain very accurate estimates for a large class of problems which includes most problems of practical interest.
Error estimation based on extrapolation
For most practical problems the estimate (1.92) is sufficiently sharp so that the less than or equal sign (≤) can be replaced by the approximately equal sign (≈) and this a priori estimate can be used in an a posteriori fashion.
The computed values of the potential energy corresponding to a sequence of finite element spaces
(1.95)
where
On dividing eq. (1.96) with eq. (1.97) and taking the logarithm we get
and, repeating with
where
Equation (1.99) can be solved for π∞ to obtain an estimate for the exact value of the potential energy.
The relative error in energy norm corresponding to the ith finite element solution in the sequence is estimated from
Usually the percent relative error is reported. This estimator has been tested against the known exact solution of many problems of various smoothness. The results have shown that it works well for a wide range of problems, including most problems of practical interest; however, it cannot be guaranteed to work well for all conceivable problems. For example, this method would fail if the exact solution would happen to be energy‐orthogonal to all basis functions associated with (say) odd values of i.
Remark 1.12 From equation (1.92) we get
