A Second-Order Scheme for the Generalized Time-Fractional Burgers' Equation

Abstract

Abstract A second-order numerical scheme is proposed to solve the generalized time-fractional Burgers' equation. The time-fractional derivative is considered in the Caputo sense. First, the quasi-linearization process is used to linearize the time-fractional Burgers' equation, which gives a sequence of linear partial differential equations (PDEs). The Crank–Nicolson scheme is used to discretize the sequence of PDEs in the temporal direction, followed by the central difference formulae for both the first and second-order spatial derivatives. The established error bounds (in the L2− norm) obtained through the meticulous theoretical analysis show that the method is second-order convergent in space and time. The technique is also shown to be conditionally stable. Some numerical experiments are presented to confirm the theoretical results.