On the computation for blow-up solutions of the nonlinear wave equation (Q2413465)

The author studies finite difference approximation for the 1D nonlinear wave equation \(\partial_t^2 u(t,x)=\partial_x^2(t,x)+ |u|^{1+\alpha }(t,x)\) (\(\alpha >0\)), the solution of which may become unbounded (blow-up) in finite time. To reproduce the finite-time blow-up numerically, adaptively-defined time meshes are considered to be necessary. However, such schemes can only give good approximation up to the blow-up time of \(\|u(t,\cdot)\|_{L^\infty}\). Since the solution of the wave equation under study continues to exist beyond the blow-up time, the author reconsiders a scheme with uniform temporal grid size instead of those with adaptively-defined time meshes, and then proposes an algorithm for the computation of the blow-up solution, including the numerical blow-up time and numerical blow-up curve. Moreover, the convergence of the numerical blow-up curve is given. Although only nonnegative initial data are considered in this paper, the numerical results suggest that this method also works well for other initial data and nonlinear terms.