A Posteriori Error Estimates of Virtual Element Method for a Simplified Friction Problem

We study a posteriori error analysis of the virtual element method (VEM) for a simplified friction problem, which is a representative elliptic variational inequality of the second kind. By treating hanging nodes as vertices of polygonal elements, the virtual element method does not require any local mesh post-processing after the adaptive mesh refinement. In this work, residual type error estimators are derived for designing adaptive VEM to solve the simplified friction problem. Furthermore, the reliability and efficiency of the error estimators are proved. Finally, a numerical example is given to verify the theoretical results.