In this paper, we propose an adaptive defect-correction method for natural convection (NC) equations. A defect-correction method (DCM) is proposed for solving NC equations to overcome the convection dominance problem caused by a high Rayleigh number. To solve the large amount of computation and the discontinuity of the gradient of the numerical solution, we combine a new recovery-type posteriori estimator in view of the gradient recovery and superconvergent theory. The presented reliability and efficiency analysis shows that the true error can be effectively bounded by the recovery-based error estimator. Finally, the stability, accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are confirmed by several numerical investigations.
Keywords: adaptive methods; defect-correction method; error bound; natural convection equations.