Object-Oriented Programming in Field Recovery and Error Estimation

Abstract.This paper considers an object-oriented implementation of a generic program module for field recovery and recovery-based error stimation. The field recovery is based on the superconvergent patch recovery technique by Zienkiewicz and Zhu. The current implementation is problem independent, and is organized as a set of C++ classes based on the software library Diffpack. The program may be run stand-alone as a post-processor, reading finite element data and results from ASCII files. Alternatively, it may be linked into existing simulation codes through a Fortran interface, thereby enabling error estimation within the time-step loop of a transient simulation.The use of the field recovery and error estimation module is demonstrated on an isotropic linear elastic problem with known analytical solution, such that also the exact error, and not only the estimated error, may be computed. The computational efficiency of the object-oriented module is assessed by comparing the time consumption with a similar program implemented in Fortran.