Recovery-based error estimator for stabilized finite element methods for the Stokes equation

A recovery-based error estimator is proposed and analyzed for stabilized P 1 / P 0 (continuous linear velocity/constant pressure) finite element approximations to the Stokes equation. Reliability and efficiency of the estimator are established for various stabilized methods. For several test problems, numerical results show that our estimator is more accurate than the classical residual error estimator.