The numerical analysis of time fractional evolution equations with the second-order elliptic operator including general time-space dependent variable coefficients is challenging, especially when the classical weak initial singularities are taken into account. In this paper, we introduce a concise technique to construct efficient time-stepping schemes with variable time step sizes for two-dimensional time fractional sub-diffusion and diffusion-wave equations with general time-space dependent variable coefficients. By means of the novel technique, the nonuniform Alikhanov type schemes are constructed and analyzed for the sub-diffusion and diffusion-wave problems. For the diffusion-wave problem, our scheme is constructed by employing the recently established symmetric fractional-order reduction (SFOR) method. The unconditional stability of proposed schemes is rigorously discussed under mild assumptions on variable coefficients and, based on reasonable regularity assumptions and weak time mesh restrictions, the second-order convergence is obtained with respect to discrete $H^1$-norm. Numerical experiments are given to demonstrate the theoretical statements.
In this work, we present a second-order nonuniform time-stepping scheme for the time-fractional Allen-Cahn equation. We show that the proposed scheme preserves the discrete maximum principle, and by using the convolution structure of consistency error, we present sharp maximum-norm error estimates which reflect the temporal regularity. As our analysis is built on nonuniform time steps, we may resolve the intrinsic initial singularity by using the graded meshes. Moreover, we propose an adaptive time-stepping strategy for large time simulations. Numerical experiments are presented to show the ef…
High-order nonuniform time-stepping and MBP-preserving linear schemes for the time-fractional Allen-Cahn equation
Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学数学科学学院）；Laboratory of Marine Mathematics, Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学海洋数学实验室）
Adaptive second-order Crank-Nicolson time-stepping methods using the recent scalar auxiliary variable (SAV) approach are developed for the time-fractional Molecular Beam Epitaxial models with Caputo's derivative. Based on the piecewise linear interpolation, the Caputo's fractional derivative is approximated by a novel second-order formula, which is naturally suitable for a general class of nonuniform meshes and essentially preserves the positive semi-definite property of integral kernel. The resulting Crank-Nicolson SAV time-stepping schemes are unconditional energy stable on nonuniform time m…
In this paper we consider the inverse problem of identifying the initial data in a fractionally damped wave equation from time trace measurements on a surface, as relevant in photoacoustic or thermoacoustic tomography. We derive and analyze a time stepping method for the numerical solution of the corresponding forward problem. Moreover, to efficiently obtain reconstructions by minimizing a Tikhonov regularization functional (or alternatively, by computing the MAP estimator in a Bayesian approach), we develop an adjoint based scheme for gradient computation. Numerical reconstructions in two spa…
In 1986, Dixon and McKee developed a discrete fractional Grönwall inequality [Z. Angew. Math. Mech., 66 (1986), pp. 535--544], which can be seen as a generalization of the classical discrete Grönwall inequality. However, this generalized discrete Grönwall inequality has not been widely applied in the numerical analysis of the time-stepping methods for the time-fractional evolution equations. The main purpose of this paper is to show how to apply the generalized discrete Grönwall inequality to prove the convergence of a class of time-stepping numerical methods for time-fractional nonlinear subd…
The discontinuous Galerkin dG method provides a robust and flexible technique for the time integration of fractional diffusion problems. However, a practical implementation uses coefficients defined by integrals that are not easily evaluated. We describe specialised quadrature techniques that efficiently maintain the overall accuracy of the dG method. In addition, we observe in numerical experiments that known superconvergence properties of dG time stepping for classical diffusion problems carry over in a modified form to the fractional-order setting.
In this paper, a temporal nonuniform $L1$ type difference scheme is built up for the time fractional diffusion-wave equation with the help of the order reduction technique. The unconditional convergence of the nonuniform difference scheme is proved rigorously in $L^2$ norm. Our main tool is the discrete complementary convolution kernels with respect to the coefficient kernels of the L1 type formula. The positive definiteness of the complementary convolution kernels is shown to be vital to the stability and convergence. To the best of our knowledge, this property is proved at the first time on …
Two fast L1 time-stepping methods, including the backward Euler and stabilized semi-implicit schemes, are suggested for the time-fractional Allen-Cahn equation with Caputo's derivative. The time mesh is refined near the initial time to resolve the intrinsically initial singularity of solution, and unequal time-steps are always incorporated into our approaches so that an adaptive time-stepping strategy can be used in long-time simulations. It is shown that the proposed schemes using the fast L1 formula preserve the discrete maximum principle. Sharp error estimates reflecting the time regularity…
This paper analyzes a time-stepping discontinuous Galerkin method for fractional diffusion-wave problems. This method uses piecewise constant functions in the temporal discretization and continuous piecewise linear functions in the spatial discretization. Nearly optimal convergence rate with respect to the regularity of the solution is established when the source term is nonsmooth, and nearly optimal convergence rate $ \ln(1/τ)(\sqrt{\ln(1/h)} h^2+τ)$ is derived under appropriate regularity assumption on the source term. Convergence is also established without smoothness assumption on the init…
In this paper, a non-uniform time-stepping convex-splitting numerical algorithm for solving the widely used time-fractional Cahn-Hilliard equation is introduced. The proposed numerical scheme employs the $L1^+$ formula for discretizing the time-fractional derivative and a second-order convex-splitting technique to deal with the non-linear term semi-implicitly. Then the pseudospectral method is utilized for spatial discretization. As a result, the fully discrete scheme has several advantages: second-order accurate in time, spectrally accurate in space, uniquely solvable, mass preserving, and un…
We introduce a symmetric fractional-order reduction (SFOR) method to construct numerical algorithms on general nonuniform temporal meshes for semilinear fractional diffusion-wave equations. By using the novel order reduction method, the governing problem is transformed to an equivalent coupled system, where the explicit orders of time-fractional derivatives involved are all $α/2$ $(1<α<2)$. The linearized L1 scheme and Alikhanov scheme are then proposed on general time meshes. Under some reasonable regularity assumptions and weak restrictions on meshes, the optimal convergence is derived for t…
In this work, we revisit the adaptive L1 time-stepping scheme for solving the time-fractional Allen-Cahn equation in the Caputo's form. The L1 implicit scheme is shown to preserve a variational energy dissipation law on arbitrary nonuniform time meshes by using the recent discrete analysis tools, i.e., the discrete orthogonal convolution kernels and discrete complementary convolution kernels. Then the discrete embedding techniques and the fractional Grönwall inequality were applied to establish an $L^2$ norm error estimate on nonuniform time meshes. An adaptive time-stepping strategy according…
Time-fractional parabolic equations with a Caputo time derivative are considered. For such equations, we explore and further develop the new methodology of the a-posteriori error estimation and adaptive time stepping proposed in [7]. We improve the earlier time stepping algorithm based on this theory, and specifically address its stable and efficient implementation in the context of high-order methods. The considered methods include an L1-2 method and continuous collocation methods of arbitrary order, for which adaptive temporal meshes are shown to yield optimal convergence rates in the presen…
The aim of this paper is to develop and analyze high-order time stepping schemes for solving semilinear subdiffusion equations. We apply the $k$-step BDF convolution quadrature to discretize the time-fractional derivative with order $α\in (0,1)$, and modify the starting steps in order to achieve optimal convergence rate. This method has already been well-studied for the linear fractional evolution equations in Jin, Li and Zhou \cite{JinLiZhou:correction}, while the numerical analysis for the nonlinear problem is still missing in the literature. By splitting the nonlinear potential term into an…
In this paper, we study the numerical schemes for the two-dimensional Fokker-Planck equation governing the probability density function of the tempered fractional Brownian motion. The main challenges of the numerical schemes come from the singularity in the time direction. When $0<H<0.5$, a change of variables $\partial \left(t^{2H}\right)=2Ht^{2H-1}\partial t$ avoids the singularity of numerical computation at $t=0$, which naturally results in nonuniform time discretization and greatly improves the computational efficiency. For $0.5<H<1$, the time span dependent numerical scheme and nonunifor…
Sharp $H^1$-norm error estimates of two time-stepping schemes for reaction-subdiffusion problems
Henan University of Economics and Law（河南财经政法大学）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Beijing Computational Science Research Center（北京计算科学研究中心）；Wayne State University（韦恩州立大学）
In this work the L2-1$_σ$ method on general nonuniform meshes is studied for the subdiffusion equation. When the time step ratio is no less than $0.475329$, a bilinear form associated with the L2-1$_σ$ fractional-derivative operator is proved to be positive semidefinite and a new global-in-time $H^1$-stability of L2-1$_σ$ schemes is then derived under simple assumptions on the initial condition and the source term. In addition, the sharp $L^2$-norm convergence is proved under the constraint that the time step ratio is no less than $0.475329$.
In this work, we consider a time-fractional Allen-Cahn equation, where the conventional first order time derivative is replaced by a Caputo fractional derivative with order $α\in(0,1)$. First, the well-posedness and (limited) smoothing property are systematically analyzed, by using the maximal $L^p$ regularity of fractional evolution equations and the fractional Grönwall's inequality. We also show the maximum principle like their conventional local-in-time counterpart. Precisely, the time-fractional equation preserves the property that the solution only takes value between the wells of the dou…
In this paper, we propose and analyze a time-stepping method for the time fractional Allen-Cahn equation. The key property of the proposed method is its unconditional stability for general meshes, including the graded mesh commonly used for this type of equations. The unconditional stability is proved through establishing a discrete nonlocal free energy dispassion law, which is also true for the continuous problem. The main idea used in the analysis is to split the time fractional derivative into two parts: a local part and a history part, which are discretized by the well known L1, L1-CN, and…
A fully implicit numerical scheme is established for solving the time fractional Swift-Hohenberg (TFSH) equation with a Caputo time derivative of order $α\in(0,1)$. The variable-step L1 formula and the finite difference method are employed for the time and the space discretizations, respectively. The unique solvability of the numerical scheme is proved by the Brouwer fixed-point theorem. With the help of the discrete convolution form of L1 formula, the time-stepping scheme is shown to preserve a discrete energy dissipation law which is asymptotically compatible with the classic energy law as $…
In this work, we propose a Crank-Nicolson-type scheme with variable steps for the time fractional Allen-Cahn equation. The proposed scheme is shown to be unconditionally stable (in a variational energy sense), and is maximum bound preserving. Interestingly, the discrete energy stability result obtained in this paper can recover the classical energy dissipation law when the fractional order $α\rightarrow 1.$ That is, our scheme can asymptotically preserve the energy dissipation law in the $α\rightarrow 1$ limit. This seems to be the first work on variable time-stepping scheme that can preserve …
In this work, the global-in-time $H^1$-stability of a fast L2-1$_σ$ method on general nonuniform meshes is studied for subdiffusion equations, where the convolution kernel in the Caputo fractional derivative is approximated by sum of exponentials. Under some mild restrictions on time stepsize, a bilinear form associated with the fast L2-1$_σ$ formula is proved to be positive semidefinite for all time. As a consequence, the uniform global-in-time $H^1$-stability of the fast L2-1$_σ$ schemes can be derived for both linear and semilinear subdiffusion equations, in the sense that the $H^1$-norm is…
In this paper, a high-order and fast numerical method is investigated for the time-fractional Black-Scholes equation. In order to deal with the typical weak initial singularities of the solution, we construct a finite difference scheme with variable time steps, where the fractional derivative is approximated by the nonuniform Alikhanov formula and the sum-of-exponentials (SOE) technique. In the spatial direction, an average approximation with fourth-order accuracy is employed. The stability and the convergence with second-order in time and fourth-order in space of the proposed scheme are relig…
Regularity and high-order time stepping for semilinear subdiffusion equations with singular initial data beyond the $L^\infty$ framework
Hunan Research Center of the Basic Discipline Fundamental Algorithmic Theory and Novel Computational Methods, School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Xiangtan University（湘潭大学数学与计算科学学院基础学科基本算法理论与新型计算方法湖南省研究中心）
An initial-boundary value problem with a Caputo time derivative of fractional order $α\in(0,1)$ is considered, solutions of which typically exhibit a singular behaviour at an initial time. An L2-type discrete fractional-derivative operator of order $3-α$ is considered on nonuniform temporal meshes. Sufficient conditions for the inverse-monotonicity of this operator are established, which yields sharp pointwise-in-time error bounds on quasi-graded temporal meshes with arbitrary degree of grading. In particular, those results imply that milder (compared to the optimal) grading yields optimal con…
In this article, a high-order time-stepping scheme based on the cubic interpolation formula is considered to approximate the generalized Caputo fractional derivative (GCFD). Convergence order for this scheme is $(4-α)$, where $α~(0<α<1)$ is the order of the GCFD. The local truncation error is also provided. Then, we adopt the developed scheme to establish a difference scheme for the solution of generalized fractional advection-diffusion equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions. Furthermore, we discuss about the stability and convergence of the difference scheme. Numerical examples are prese…
A time-stepping L1 scheme for subdiffusion equation with a Riemann--Liouville time-fractional derivative is developed and analyzed. This is the first paper to show that the L1 scheme for the model problem under consideration is second-order accurate (sharp error estimate) over nonuniform time-steps. The established convergence analysis is novel, innovative and concise. For completeness, the L1 scheme is combined with the standard Galerkin finite elements for the spatial discretization, which will then define a fully-discrete numerical scheme. The error analysis for this scheme is also investig…
The numerical integration of phase-field equations is a delicate task which needs to recover at the discrete level intrinsic properties of the solution such as energy dissipation and maximum principle. Although the theory of energy dissipation for classical phase field models is well established, the corresponding theory for time-fractional phase-field models is still incomplete. In this article, we study certain nonlocal-in-time energies using the first-order stabilized semi-implicit L1 scheme. In particular, we will establish a discrete fractional energy law and a discrete weighted energy la…
