Variational formulation for fractional inhomogeneous boundary value problems (Q2216488)

The paper studies the variational formulation and the finite element approximation for the stationary one-dimensional fractional convection-diffusion equation equipped with inhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. The equation is transformed to the equation with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions by the standard approach, i.e., by subtracting an appropriate function from the solution. After the transformation, the source term becomes singular, which complicates derivation and analysis of the finite element method. In the paper, the authors derive an appropriate variational formulation, prove the existence, uniqueness and stability of the solution of the variational problem, and also study a variational formulation for the adjoint problem. Furthermore, the finite element scheme is proposed, and error estimates are derived with respect to the \(L^2\)-norm and the norm of fractional Sobolev space. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to confirm the theoretical results and illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method.