Error indicators for mixed finite elements in 2-dimensional linear elasticity Original Research Article

We establish a posteriori error indicators for mixed finite elements in plane elasticity. The error estimators refer to residuals of the strong equations and to jumps of the displacements on interelement boundaries. For the BDM elements of lowest order, the error indicators are computed with displacement fields which are obtained by a postprocessing procedure. Numerical examples show that adaptive mesh refinements based on these estimators lead to very efficient algorithms.