Uniformly convergent high order finite element solutions of a singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion equation using mesh equidistribution (Q5948558)

This paper is concerned with the numerical solution of the singularly perturbed boundary value problem: \( L_{\varepsilon} u \equiv - \varepsilon^2 u''(x) + b(x)^2 u(x)= f(x)\), \(x \in (0,1)\), \( u(0)=0\), \(u(1)=0\) by means of Galerkin finite element discretizations with suitable mesh distributions. As it is well known in order to achieve the uniform convergence of the discretization several strategies to select a non uniform grid have been proposed. Here the authors use a monitor function introduced by them in a previous paper [J. Comput. Appl. Math. 131, No. 1-2, 381-405 (2001; Zbl 0984.65076)] based on the second derivative of the solution. In this context they prove that, by using an adaptive refinement that moves a fixed number of grid points in the interval \([0,1]\), the \(p\)th order Galerkin finite element discretization converges uniformly. Special attention is paid to the effective construction of the grid associated to the monitor function \( M = \alpha + |w_N''(x)|^{1/m} \) (here \(w\) is the singular component of \(u\)) for some values of the parameters \( \alpha > 0 \) and the positive integer \(m\). Finally, a numerical example is presented to show the behaviour of the method for several values of \(N\) in the \( L_{\infty}\), \(L_2 \) and energy norms.