A family of new fourth-order solvers for a nonlinear damped wave equation (Q743333)

The authors consider a semi-linear wave equation with linear damping for which a first-kind initial boundary value problem is posed in a rectangle. Apart from the nonlinear right-hand side, the differential operator contains constant coefficients only. They construct a family of compact implicit difference schemes of accuracy \(\Delta t^2+h^4\) and use a fourth-order scheme on the first time level. Since the matrix multiplying the highest time level is factorized, the schemes can be solved by an algorithm of alternating directions. Assuming more smoothness of the exact solution, they also prove that the Richardson extrapolation can be applied leading to an accuracy of \(\Delta t^4+h^4\). The paper concludes presenting 5 test examples (among them the sine-Gordon equation), exhibiting \(H^1,\,L^2,\,L^\infty\) errors and computing times illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.