Unifying a posteriori error analysis of five piecewise quadratic discretisations for the biharmonic equation

An abstract property (H) is the key to a complete a priori error analysis in the (discrete) energy norm for several nonstandard finite element methods in the recent work [Lowest-order equivalent nonstandard finite element methods for biharmonic plates, Carstensen and Nataraj, M2AN, 2022]. This paper investigates the impact of (H) to the a posteriori error analysis and establishes known and novel explicit residual-based a posteriori error estimates. The abstract framework applies to Morley, two versions of discontinuous Galerkin, C 0 interior penalty, as well as weakly over-penalized symmetric interior penalty schemes for the biharmonic equation with a general source term in H −2 (Ω).