Equilibrated-flux residual certification for verified existence and outputs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rigorous certification workflow for nonlinear elliptic boundary value problems, combining equilibrated-flux residuals, stability bounds, and Lipschitz estimates to verify existence, uniqueness, and output bounds of solutions.

Contribution

It develops a novel post-processing certification method that upgrades finite element solutions to rigorous existence and output certificates using equilibrated-flux reconstructions and Newton--Kantorovich arguments.

Findings

Certificates are informative and reliable.

Adjoint-based correction reduces enclosure widths.

Method effectively verifies solutions for semilinear diffusion models.

Abstract

We present a post-processing certification workflow for nonlinear elliptic boundary value problems that upgrades a standard finite element computation to a rigorous existence and output certificate. For a given approximate discrete state, we verify existence and local uniqueness of a weak solution in a computable neighbourhood via a Newton--Kantorovich argument based on three certified ingredients: a guaranteed dual-norm residual bound, a computable lower bound for the stability constant of the linearised operator, and a Lipschitz bound for the derivative on the verification ball. The residual bound is obtained by an equilibrated-flux reconstruction exploiting an explicit relation between nonconforming and mixed formulations, yielding $H(\mathrm{div})$-conforming fluxes without local mixed solves. The stability ingredient follows from a computable coercivity lower bound for the linearisation. An admissible verification radius is selected by a simple bracketing--bisection search, justified for an affine Lipschitz model. Once the verification ball is certified, we derive guaranteed enclosures for quantities of interest using computable variation bounds; an adjoint-based correction, in the spirit of goal-oriented error estimation, tightens these intervals while retaining full rigour. Numerical experiments for semilinear diffusion--reaction models show that the certificates are informative and that the adjoint enhancement substantially reduces enclosure widths.