In this paper the problem − div(a(x,y)∇u) = f with Dirichlet boundary conditions on a square is solved iteratively with high accuracy for u and ∇u using a new scheme called “hermitian box-scheme”. The design of the scheme is based on a “hermitian box”, combining the approximation of the gradient by the fourth order hermitian derivative, with a conservative discrete formulation on boxes of length 2h. The iterative technique is based on the repeated solution by a fast direct method of a discrete Poisson equation on a uniform rectangular mesh. The problem is suitably scaled before iteration. The numerical results obtained show the efficiency of the numerical scheme. This work is the extension to strongly elliptic problems of the hermitian box-scheme presented by Abbas and Croisille (J. Sci. Comput., 49 (2011), pp. 239-267).

In this paper, we revisit a priori error analysis of nonconforming finite element methods for the Poisson problem. Based on some techniques developed in the context of the a posteriori error analysis, under two reasonable assumptions on the nonconforming finite element spaces, we prove that, up to some oscillation terms, the consistency error can be bounded by the approximation error. We check these two assumptions for the most used lower order nonconforming finite element methods. Compared with the classical error analysis of the nonconforming finite element method, the a priori analysis herein only needs the H1 regularity of the exact solution.