Finite element discretizations for variable-order fractional diffusion problems (Q6053001)

The authors present a finite element scheme to approximate a multidimensional fractional diffusion problems with spatially varying diffusivity and fractional order. An approach which decomposes the stiffness matrix into three components is proposed. The first is a sparse matrix that handles the singular near-field separately, and is computed by adapting singular quadrature techniques available for the homogeneous case to the case of spatially variable order. The second component handles the remaining smooth part of the near-field as well as the far-field, and is approximated by a hierarchical \(\mathcal{H}^2\) matrix that maintains linear complexity in storage and operations. The third component handles the effect of the global mesh at every node, and is written as a weighted mass matrix whose density is computed by a fast-multipole type method. The resulting algorithm has therefore overall linear space and time complexity. Analysis of the consistency of the stiffness matrix is provided. Some numerical tests are presented to illustrate the convergence and performance of the proposed algorithm.