On the techniques for constructing admissible stress fields in model verification: Performances on engineering examples

Abstract

Robust global/goal-oriented error estimation is used nowadays to control the approximate finite element solutions obtained from simulation. In the context of Computational Mechanics, the construction of admissible stress fields (\ie stress tensors which verify the equilibrium equations) is required to set up strict and guaranteed error bounds (using residual based error estimators) and plays an important role in the quality of the error estimates. This work focuses on the different procedures used in the calculation of admissible stress fields, which is a crucial and technically complicated point. The three main techniques that currently exist, called the element equilibration technique (EET), the star-patch equilibration technique (SPET), and the element equilibration + star-patch technique (EESPT), are investigated and compared with respect to three different criteria, namely the quality of associated error estimators, computational cost and easiness of practical implementation into commercial finite element codes. The numerical results which are presented focus on industrial problems; they highlight the main advantages and drawbacks of the different methods and show that the behavior of the three estimators, which have the same convergence rate as the exact global error, is consistent. Two- and three-dimensional experiments have been carried out in order to compare the performance and the computational cost of the three different approaches. The analysis of the results reveals that the SPET is more accurate than EET and EESPT methods, but the corresponding computational cost is higher. Overall, the numerical tests prove the interest of the hybrid method EESPT and show that it is a correct compromise between quality of the error estimate, practical implementation and computational cost.