A Posteriori Error Analysis of the Virtual Element Method for Second-Order Quasilinear Elliptic PDEs

Abstract In this paper we develop a <m:math xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <m:msup> <m:mi>C</m:mi> <m:mn>0</m:mn> </m:msup> </m:math> {C^{0}} -conforming virtual element method (VEM) for a class of second-order quasilinear elliptic PDEs in two dimensions. We present a posteriori error analysis for this problem and derive a residual based error estimator. The estimator is fully computable and we prove upper and lower bounds of the error which are explicit in the local mesh size. We use the estimator to drive an adaptive mesh refinement algorithm. A handful of numerical test problems are carried out to study the performance of the proposed error indicator.