Error estimation and error bounding in energy norm based on a displacement recovery technique

Traditionally, recovery based error estimators in linear elasticity have considered the evaluation of an enhanced stress field obtained from the raw Finite Element (FE) stress solution. Instead of that, one can also obtain a recovered displacement field from the FE displacements. Herein, we describe a superconvergent patch recovery of the displacement field which considers the local fulfilment of boundary and internal equilibrium equations, Dirichlet constraints and, for singular problems, the splitting of the displacement and stress fields into singular and smooth parts. Numerical tests using problems with known analytical solution have been carried out to validate the proposed technique for error estimation and error bounding in energy norm and quantities of interest.