An Equilibration Based A Posteriori Error Estimate for the Biharmonic Equation and Two Finite Element Methods

Abstract

We develop an a posteriori error bound for the interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin approximation of the biharmonic equation with continuous finite elements. The error bound is based on the two-energies principle and requires the computation of an equilibrated moment tensor. The natural space for the moment tensor is that of symmetric tensor fields with continuous normal-normal components, and is well-known from the Hellan-Herrmann-Johnson mixed formulation. We propose a construction that is totally local. The procedure can also be applied to the original Hellan-Herrmann-Johnson formulation, which directly provides an equilibrated moment tensor.