A vertex-centred finite volume method for the 3D multi-term time and space fractional Bloch-Torrey equation with fractional Laplacian (Q2160957)

The authors study anomalous diffusion in biological tissues using a multi-term time-space FBTE (fractional Bloch-Torrey) system on 3D domains. An alternative space-fractional derivative which is the fractional Laplacian is considered. A vertex-centred finite volume method is developed on unstructured tetrahedral meshes. This development provides a setting to approximate the fractional Laplacian via the matrix transfer technique. A Krylov subspace framework is then used to approximate the required matrix function approximations so that the sparsity of \(m(-\Delta)\) ) can be exploited to reduce the computational overhead of the algorithm. An adaptive preconditioner is implemented to accelerate the rate of convergence. Some block matrix functions to deal with the coupled system are introduced. The time-fractional derivatives in a multi-term formulation are discretised by the WSGL (Weighted and shifted Grünwald-Letnikov) formula. Some numerical tests are presented to show the efficiency of the numerical scheme.