A locally conservative staggered least squares method on polygonal meshes

In this paper, we propose a novel staggered least squares method for elliptic equations on polygonal meshes. Our new method can be flexibly applied to rough grids and allows hanging nodes, which is of particular interest in practical applications. Moreover, it offers the advantage of not having to deal with inf-sup conditions and yielding positive definite discrete problems. Optimal a priori error estimates in energy norm are derived. In addition, a superconvergent estimates in energy norm are also developed by employing variational error expansion. The main difficulty involved here is to show the L² norm error estimates for the potential variable, where duality argument and the superconvergent estimates are the key ingredients. The single valued flux over the outer boundary of the dual partition enables us to construct a locally conservative flux. Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical findings and the performance of the adaptive mesh refinement guided by the least squares functional estimator are also displayed. © 2024 the Author(s).