A time step and mesh should always be chosen in a such a way that the error made during the numerical solving procedure is acceptably small. In this chapter we consider a general system of nonlinear PDEs and there is no rigorous theory available which covers the error behavior of such systems. However for certain special classes of problems there are well-known results which can be used as basis for the study of more complex systems.
For our purpose the case
and
in (2.1) is of special interest, since it represents the problems discussed in this work in its simplest form.
Using a backward Euler scheme and a finite element method with linear basic nodal functions we have the estimate [13,10,9],
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(2.52) |
Taking into account that the logarithmic quantity in (
) changes slowly, it can be absorbed in the constant
and considering that,
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(2.53) |
The first term on the right side of (2.54) corresponds to the time discretization error and the second to the spatial discretization error [13].
If we want to achieve the time discretization error to be bounded by for
, we have to ensure that,
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(2.57) |
To estimate the error of the spatial finite element discretization several methods are known today. These methods are based on the estimation of the second term on the right side of (2.54) using the solution obtained by means of the finite element method (a posteriori error estimators)[13,10,9].
First we will present the flux error estimator based on the work by Babuska, Bieterman, and Rheinboldt [9].
We consider a tethraedron
and define a tehraedron-patch
as the subset of
of all tethraedrons which have one common face with
.
Each point
of the discretization holds a concentration value
and inside of the each element the concentration is linearly interpolated as
. In the following we omit the discrete time index
, because we consider only a single time step.
The concentration gradient, calculated by
, is constant on each element
and discontinuously changes between two neighboring elements. We write
for
.
This discontinuity expresses the error of the approximation and can be quantified on the tehraedron-patch
as the flux error estimator,
![]() |
(2.58) |
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(2.59) |
The second spatial discretization error estimator presented here is the gradient recovery error estimator which is widely used today in the finite element community [14].
For the derivation of the gradient recovery error estimator we first need the recovered gradient.
The recovered gradient is calculated as the Lagrange interpolate at the nodes of the mesh.
Taking a node
and defining
as a point-patch of all elements which contain node
as one of its nodes.
The recovered gradient
at the node
, is then calculated as,
![]() |
(2.60) |
![]() |
(2.61) |
![]() |
(2.62) |
![]() |
(2.63) |
For the applications discussed in this thesis the physically motivated dosis error estimator (Section 3.9) has even more importance than the error estimators presented above.
Independent of the actual mesh adaptation strategy and error estimator, the following algorithm for the finite element adaptive computation can be applied [15],
Here denotes the total error,
is an error estimator,
or
, and
is a given tolerance for the relative error.