A novel spectral method and error estimates for fourth-order problems with mixed boundary conditions in a cylindrical domain

Abstract

In this paper, a novel spectral method is presented and studied for the fourth order problem with mixed boundary in a cylindrical domain. The basic idea of our approach is to reduce the original problem into a series of decoupled two-dimensional fourth-order problems first, by using the cylindrical coordinate transformation and Fourier expansion, and then adopt the standard spectral method to solve the decoupled problems. A new essential pole condition is proposed to overcome the difficulty caused by the introduction of singularity and variable coefficients in cylindrical coordinate transformation. Existence and uniqueness of the weak solution and the discrete numerical solution are proved, and error estimates of the spectral method are derived. Furthermore, the efficient implementation of our algorithm is discussed, where a set of effective basis functions are constructed to ensure the sparsity of the mass matrix and stiffness matrix. Numerical examples are presented to validate the theoretical findings and the efficiency of our algorithm.