We consider a posteriori error estimators that can be applied to anisotropic tetrahedral finite element meshes, i.e. meshes where the aspect ratio of the elements can be arbitrarily large. Two kinds of Zienkiewicz–Zhu (ZZ) type error estimators are derived which originate from different backgrounds. In the course of the analysis, the first estimator turns out to be a special case of the second one, and both estimators can be expressed using some recovered gradient. The advantage of keeping two different...

We consider a posteriori error estimators that can be applied to anisotropic tetrahedral finite element meshes, i.e. meshes where the aspect ratio of the elements can be arbitrarily large. Two kinds of Zienkiewicz–Zhu (ZZ) type error estimators are derived which originate from different backgrounds. In the course of the analysis, the first estimator turns out to be a special case of the second one, and both estimators can be expressed using some recovered gradient. The advantage of keeping two...