Confidence Intervals for Richardson Extrapolation in Solid Mechanics

Abstract

A simple procedure for estimating the uncertainty of estimates of true solutions to problems of deflection, stress concentrations, and force resultants in solid and structural mechanics is introduced. Richardson extrapolation is carried out on a dataset of samples from a sequence of four grids. Simple median-based statistical analysis is used to establish 95% confidence intervals. The procedure leads to simple calculations that deliver reasonably tight estimates of the true solution and confidence intervals.