A posteriori discontinuous Galerkin error estimation on tetrahedral meshes

In this manuscript we present a simple and efficient a posteriori error estimation procedure for a discontinuous finite element method applied to scalar first-order hyperbolic problems on structured and unstructured tetrahedral meshes. We present a local error analysis to derive a discontinuous Galerkin orthogonality condition for the leading term of the discretization error and find basis functions spanning the error. We describe an implicit error estimation procedure for the leading term of the discretization error by solving a local problem on each tetrahedron. Numerical computations show that the implicit a posteriori error estimation procedure yields accurate estimates for linear and nonlinear problems with smooth solutions. Furthermore, we show the performance of our error estimates on problems with discontinuous solutions. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.