# A posteriori error estimation for planar linear elasticity by stress reconstruction

## TL;DR

This paper extends a posteriori error estimation techniques for linear elasticity, ensuring guaranteed reliability and efficiency, including in the incompressible limit, through stress reconstruction and conforming approximation modifications.

## Contribution

It introduces modifications to stress reconstruction and conforming approximation methods for reliable a posteriori error estimation in linear elasticity, applicable even in incompressible cases.

## Key findings

- Guaranteed error bounds with known constants achieved.
- Local efficiency of the estimator demonstrated.
- Effective adaptive computations across Lamé parameters.

## Abstract

The nonconforming triangular piecewise quadratic finite element space by Fortin and Soulie can be used for the displacement approximation and its combination with discontinuous piecewise linear pressure elements is known to constitute a stable combination for incompressible linear elasticity computations. In this contribution, we extend the stress reconstruction procedure and resulting guaranteed a posteriori error estimator developed by Ainsworth, Allendes, Barrenechea and Rankin \cite{AinAllBarRan:12} and by Kim \cite{Kim:12a} to linear elasticity. In order to get a guaranteed reliability bound with respect to the energy norm involving only known constants, two modifications are carried out: (i) the stress reconstruction in next-to-lowest order Raviart-Thomas spaces is modified in such way that its anti-symmetric part vanishes in average on each element; (ii) the auxiliary conforming approximation is constructed under the constraint that its divergence coincides with the one for the nonconforming approximation. An important aspect of our construction is that all results hold uniformly in the incompressible limit. Local efficiency is also shown and the effectiveness is illustrated by adaptive computations involving different Lam\'e parameters including the incompressible limit case.