Uniform convergence and a posteriori error estimators for the enhanced strain finite element method

Enhanced strain elements, frequently employed in practice, are known to improve the approximation of standard (non-enhanced) displacement-based elements in finite element computations. The first contribution in this work towards a complete theoretical explanation for this observation is a proof of robust convergence of enhanced element schemes: it is shown that such schemes are locking-free in the incompressible limit, in the sense that the error bound in the a priori estimate is independent of the relevant Lame constant. The second contribution is a residual-based a posteriori error estimate; the L-2 norm of the stress error is estimated by a reliable and efficient estimator that can be computed from the residuals.