  There is a number of explicit kinetic energy density functionals for
non-interacting electron systems that are obtained in terms of the electron
density and its derivatives. These semilocal functionals have been widely used
in the literature. In this work we present a comparative study of the kinetic
energy density of these semilocal functionals, stressing the importance of the
local behavior to assess the quality of the functionals. We propose a quality
factor that measures the local differences between the usual orbital-based
kinetic energy density distributions and the approximated ones, allowing to
ensure if the good results obtained for the total kinetic energies with these
semilocal functionals are due to their correct local performance or to error
cancellations. We have also included contributions coming from the laplacian of
the electron density to work with an infinite set of kinetic energy densities.
For all the functionals but one we have found that their success in the
evaluation of the total kinetic energy are due to global error cancellations,
whereas the local behavior of their kinetic energy density becomes worse than
that corresponding to the Thomas-Fermi functional.
