An efficient spectral method for nonlinear Volterra integro-differential equations with weakly singular kernels

Abstract

For Volterra integro-differential equations (VIDEs) with weakly singular kernels, their solutions are singular at the initial time. This property brings a great challenge to traditional numerical methods. Here, we investigate the numerical approximation for the solution of the nonlinear model with weakly singular kernels. Due to its characteristic, we split the interval and focus on the first one to save operation. We employ the corresponding singular functions as basis functions in the first interval to simulate its singular behavior, and take the Legendre polynomials as basis functions in the other one. Then the corresponding hp-version spectral method is proposed, the existence and uniqueness of solution to the numerical scheme are proved, the hp-version optimal convergence is derived. Numerical experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords

• spectral element method
• Volterra integro-differential equation
• weak singularity
• exponential convergence