An optimal two-step quadratic spline collocation method for the Dirichlet biharmonic problem (Q2084252)

The authors of this article consider the Dirichlet biharmonic problem on a unit square. First, they rewrite the problem at hand as a coupled system of two Poisson equations. Second, the fast Fourier transform is used to solve the discretizations using orthogonal spline collocation of these Poisson equations with either Dirichlet or Neumann conditions. This has the advantage that one has to solve a system of equations with a symmetric and positive matrix instead of a nonsymmetric one because they use the Schur complement method. Those systems are then solved efficiently with a preconditioned conjugate gradient method. It is shown that the complexity of the method on a \(N\times N\) partition of the unit square is \(\mathcal{O}\left(N^2\log N\right)\). Finally, several numerical results are given to show that the optimal accuracy of their proposed method is indeed fourth-order accurate. However, a theoretical proof of this observation is still open and subject to future research.