Numerical treatment of a well-posed Chebyshev tau method for Bagley-Torvik equation with high-order of accuracy (Q306353)

The Bagley-Torvik equation is a second-order differential equation involving the Caputo fractional derivative. These arise in the modelling of dynamical systems including certain micro-electro-mechanical systems. The author proposes, develops and analyzes a new high-order numerical method for solving the Bagley-Torvik equation using Chebychev polynomials as basis functions. Employing a regularizaton technique, the given equation is transformed into a new equation which exhibits better regularity properties, relative to the derivatives. An approximate solution is obtained by solving a well-conditioned upper triangular linear algebraic system. The tau representation of the problem is shown to possess a high-order convergence property under more inclusive regularity assumptions on the input data than the original problem. Theoretical results are complemented with numerical implementations.