Hessian Recovery for Finite Element Methods

Abstract: In this article, we propose and analyze an effective Hessian recovery strategy for the Lagrangian finite element of arbitrary order $k$. We prove that the proposed Hessian recovery preserves polynomials of degree $k+1$ on general unstructured meshes and superconverges at rate $O(h^k)$ on mildly structured meshes. In addition, the method preserves polynomials of degree $k+2$ on translation invariant meshes and produces a symmetric Hessian matrix when the sampling points for recovery are selected with symmetry. Numerical examples are presented to support our theoretical results.