ON THE INTERPOLATION ERROR ESTIMATES FOR Q1 QUADRILATERAL FINITE ELEMENTS.

In this paper, we study the relation between the error estimate of the bilinear interpolation on a general quadrilateral and the geometric characters of the quadrilateral. Some explicit bounds of the interpolation error are obtained based on some sharp estimates of the integral over 1/∣J∣p-1 for 1 ≤ p≤∞ on the reference element, where J is the Jacobian of the nonaffine mapping. This allows us to introduce weak geometric conditions (depending on p) leading to interpolation error estimates in the W1,p norm, for any p ϵ [1,∞), which can be regarded as a generalization of the regular decomposition property (RDP) condition introduced in [G. Acosta and R. G. Durán, SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 38 (2000), pp. 1073-1088] for p = 2 and new RDP conditions (NRDP) for p ≠ 2. We avoid the use of the reference family elements, which allows us to extend the results to a larger class of elements and to introduce the NRDP condition in a more unified way. As far as we know, the mesh condition presented in this paper is weaker than any other mesh conditions proposed in the literature for any p with 1 ≤ p≤∞. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]