Uniform convergence of a weighted average scheme for a nonlinear reaction-diffusion problem (Q869508)

The nonlinear reaction-diffusion equation \[ -\mu^2(u_{xx}+ u_{yy})+ u_t= f(x, y,t,u)\quad\text{for }(x,y,t)\in (0,1)^2\times\mathbb{R} \] with Dirichlet initial-boundary conditions is investigated. Here \(\mu\) is a small positive parameter responsible for boundary layers effect. The authors construct a 10-point weighted average difference scheme (i.e. \(\theta\)-scheme) and under the CFL-type condition on space and time step sizes of the mesh they obtain the truncation error of this scheme (separately for the Crank-Nicolson case, i.e. for \(\theta= 0.5\) and for other values of \(\theta\)). Next, they prove the uniform (with respect to \(\mu\)) convergence of the difference scheme on piecewise uniform and log-meshes. Extensive numerical considerations are devoted to the model equation with the right side \({u-4\over u-5}\) and some theoretical conjectures about further features of the scheme are formulated.