Gradient recovery type a posteriori error estimates of virtual element method for an elliptic variational inequality of the second kind

In this paper, gradient recovery type a posteriori error estimators of virtual element discretization are derived for a simplified friction problem, which is a typical elliptic variational inequality of the second kind. Both the reliability and the efficiency of the error estimators are proved. In addition, one numerical example is presented to show the efficiency of the adaptive VEM based on the derived error estimators.