On the finite difference approximation for a parabolic blow-up problem (Q2467040)

The paper deals with the blow-up phenomena in the cases of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) \[ \dot{u}=G(u) \] and of a partial differential equation (PDE) \[ \frac{\partial u}{\partial t}=\frac{\partial^2 u}{\partial x^2}+f(u). \] These equations are discretized by an explicit difference scheme on an irregular grid with the step-sizes \(\Delta t_n=\tau \text{min}\{c_0, H(u^n)\}\), where \(u^n\) is the numerical solution on the \(n\)-th time layer, \(c_0\) is a constant and \(H\) is a function with the properties of a norm. In the case of an ODE it is shown that \(| T(\tau)-T| ={\mathcal O}(\tau), \) where \(T\) is the exact and \(T(\tau)\) the numerical blow-up time. For the PDEs with nonlinearities \(f(u)\) of some class the convergence \(T(\tau) \to T\) is proven. Further on, for the nonlinearity \(f(u)=u^{1+\alpha}\) the authors discuss (numerically) the behaviour of the blow-up time versus \(\alpha\) and investigate theoretically the asymptotic behaviour of the numerical solution in the cases \(f(u)=u^{1+\alpha}\) and \(f(u)=u[\log{(1+u)}]^{\beta}\).