Error Estimation and Stress Recovery in the Isogeometrical Analysis Method

In the paper, a new approach is presented for improving the stress field and estimating the solution error based on the isogeometrical analysis method. In this approach, by using the superconvergent points for the components of the stress field in each area, an imaginary surface is generated. The surface is described by the same NURBS’ basis functions which are employed for approximating the displacement function in the isogeometrical analysis. The performance of the method is demonstrated by comparison of the exact and approximate energy error norms for a couple of examples that the exact solution is available. It seems that the proposed method can be used as a suitable approach for error estimation in the isogeometrical analysis method.