HIERARCHICAL MESH ADAPTATION OF 2D QUADRILATERAL ELEMENTS

In this paper, we present some examples which illustrate the use of ad aptive finite element analysis using a new hierarchical refinement alg orithm for 2D quadrilateral elements. Projection type a posteriori err or estimators based on a global stress smoothing and a simple stress a veraging scheme have been used. The algorithm produces well refined me shes for some simple examples which contain stress singularities and s tress concentrations. The convergence of the energy norm error has bee n found to be improved over a previous simple splitting algorithm.