Error estimates for finite element methods for scalar conservation laws

In this paper, new a posteriors error estimates for the shock-capturing streamline diffusion (SCSD) method and the shock-capturing discontinuous galerkin (SCDG) method for scalar conservation laws are obtained. These estimates are then used to prove that the SCSD method and the SCDG method converge to the entropy solution with a rate of at least $h^{{1 / 8}} $ and $h^{{1 / 8}} $, respectively, in the $L^\infty (L^1 )$-norm. The triangulations are made of general acute simplices and the approximate solution is taken to be piecewise a polynomial of degree k. The result is independent of the dimension of the space.