Locally Conservative Fluxes for the Continuous Galerkin Method

The standard continuous Galerkin (CG) finite element method for second order elliptic problems suffers from its inability to provide conservative flux approximations, a much needed quantity in many applications. We show how to overcome this shortcoming by using a two step postprocessing. The first step is the computation of a numerical flux trace defined on element interfaces and is motivated by the structure of the numerical traces of discontinuous Galerkin methods. This computation is non-local in that it requires the solution of a symmetric positive definite system, but the system is well conditioned independently of mesh size, so it can be solved at asymptotically optimal cost. The second step is a local element by element postprocessing of the CG solution incorporating the result of the first step. This leads to a conservative flux approximation with continuous normal components. This postprocessing applies for the CG method in its standard form or for a hybridized version of it. We present the hybridized version since it allows easy handling of variable-degree polynomials and hanging nodes. Furthermore, we provide an a priori analysis of the error in the postprocessed flux approximation and display numerical evidence suggesting that the approximation is competitive with the approximation provided by the Raviart-Thomas mixed method of corresponding degree.