New Error Estimates of Nonconforming Finite Element Methods for the Poisson Problem with Low Regularity Solution

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.