A comparison of adaptive refinement techniques for elliptic problems

Adaptive refinement has proved to be a useful tool for reducing the size of the linear system of equations obtained by discretizing partial differential equations. We consider techniques for the adaptive refinement of triangulations used with the finite element method with piecewise linear functions. Several such techniques that differ mainly in the method for dividing triangles and the method for indicating which triangles have the largest error have been developed. We describe four methods for dividing triangles and eight methods for indicating errors. Angle bounds for the triangle division methods are compared. All combinations of triangle divisions and error indicators are compared in a numerical experiment using a population of eight test problems with a variety of difficulties (peaks, boundary layers, singularities, etc.). The comparison is based on the L-infinity norm of the error versus the number of vertices. It is found that all of the methods produce asymptotically optimal grids and that the number of vertices needed for a given error rarely differs by more than a factor of two.

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