A Space-Time Legendre-Petrov-Galerkin Method for Third-Order Differential Equations

Abstract

In this article, a space-time spectral method is considered to approximate third-order differential equations with non-periodic boundary conditions. The Legendre-Petrov-Galerkin discretization is employed in both space and time. In the theoretical analysis, rigorous proof of error estimates in the weighted space-time norms is obtained for the fully discrete scheme. We also formulate the matrix form of the fully discrete scheme by taking appropriate test and trial functions in both space and time. Finally, extensive numerical experiments are conducted for linear and nonlinear problems, and spectral accuracy is derived for both space and time. Moreover, the numerical results are compared with those computed by other numerical methods to confirm the efficiency of the proposed method.

Keywords

• third-order differential equations
• Legendre-Petrov-Galerkin methods
• space-time spectral methods
• exponential convergence