Three‐dimensional superconvergent gradient recovery on tetrahedral meshes

In this paper, finite element superconvergence phenomenon based on centroidal Voronoi Delaunay tessellations (CVDT) in three‐dimensional space is investigated. The Laplacian operator with the Dirichlet boundary condition is considered. A modified superconvergence patch recovery (MSPR) method is established to overcome the influence of slivers on CVDT meshes. With these two key preconditions, a CVDT mesh and the MSPR, the gradients recovered from the linear finite element solutions have superconvergence in the l₂ norm at nodes of a CVDT mesh for an arbitrary three‐dimensional bounded domain. Numerous numerical examples are presented to demonstrate this superconvergence property and good performance of the MSPR method. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.