Hybrid A Posteriori Error Estimators for Conforming Finite Element Approximations to Stationary Convection-Diffusion-Reaction equations

Abstract: We consider the a posteriori error estimation for convection-diffusion-reaction equations in both diffusion-dominated and convection/reaction-dominated regimes. We present an explicit hybrid estimator, which, in each regime, is proved to be reliable and efficient with constants independent of the parameters in the underlying problem. For convection-dominated problems, the norm introduced by Verf{\"u}rth \cite{verf2005confusion} is used to measure the approximation error. Various numerical experiments are performed to (1) demonstrate the robustness of the hybrid estimator; (2) show that the hybrid estimator is more accurate than the explicit residual estimator and is less sensitive to the size of reaction, even though both of them are robust.