Residual a posteriori error estimators for contact problems in elasticity

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the unilateral contact problem in linear elasticity. We define two a posteriori error estimators of residual type to evaluate the accuracy of the mixed finite element approximation of the contact problem. Upper and lower bounds of the discretization error are proved for both estimators and several computations are performed to illustrate the theoretical results. © EDP Sciences, SMAI 2007.