Space-time finite element method for the distributed-order time fractional reaction diffusion equations (Q2301445)

The authors present a space-time finite element method for the distributed-order time fractional reaction diffusion equations in 1D and 2D. They first use the composite trapezoidal rule, the composite Simpson's rule and the Gauss-Legendre quadrature rule to discrete the distributed-order derivative respectively, then they propose fully discrete schemes for the multi-term form of the problem. Detailed error estimates are given for the fully discrete schemes under the reasonable assumptions that the exact solution has some singular behavior at initial time \(t=0\). They also propose a fast method for implementation of the space-time finite element method. Some numerical examples are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the schemes. The proposed space-time finite element method is novel and the error analysis of this method is also provided in this paper.