A posteriori error estimation in finite element analysis serves as an important guide to the meshing tool in an adaptive refinement process. However, the traditional
posteriori error estimates, which are often defined in the energy or energy-type norms over the entire domain, provide users insufficient information regarding the accuracy of specific quantities in the solution. This paper describes an adaptive quadrilateral refinement process with a goal-oriented error estimation, in which
a posteriori error is estimated with respect to the specified quantity of interest. A highlight of this paper is the demonstration of tools described in the paper used in a practical industrial environment. The performance of this process is demonstrated on several practical problems where the comparison is with the adaptive process based on the traditional error estimation.
Keywords Adaptive refinement - A posteriori error estimation - Error analysis - Finite element analysis - Mesh generation