Natural superconvergence points and asymptotic expansions for spline finite elements in one dimension

Abstract

We study the natural superconvergence points and asymptotic expansions of one-dimensional spline finite element approximations. For a spline space of degree $k$ and any smoothness $0\le\mu\le k-1$, we prove that the $s$-th derivative of the error exhibits enhanced convergence of order $O(h^{k+2-s})$ at points where $k-s$ is even, provided the mesh is symmetric within a region of size $Ch|\ln h|$ around the point. This condition is known to be optimal for the cases of low derivative order $s=0,1$; the present analysis shows that the same local condition is sufficient for all admissible $s$. Moreover, by expanding the error in Legendre polynomials, a closure theorem determines the leading-order Legendre coefficients (the asymptotic expansion of the error) by combining the Galerkin orthogonality with the superconvergence conditions. For $\mu=k-1$ (B-splines) and $\mu=k-2$, the Galerkin orthogonality conditions vanish and the coefficients are determined solely by the superconvergence conditions. The asymptotic expansion can be expressed through a simple antiderivative recurrence on Legendre polynomials. The resulting polynomial's zeros encode the complete set of superconvergence points for all derivative orders. Numerical experiments for selected $(k,\mu)$ pairs confirm the theoretical predictions.