Comparative study on order-reduced methods for linear third-order ordinary differential equations

Abstract

The linear third-order ordinary differential equation (ODE) can be transformed into a system of two second-order ODEs by introducing a variable replacement, which is different from the common order-reduced approach. We choose the functions p(x) and q(x) in the variable replacement to get different cases of the special order-reduced system for the linear third-order ODE. We analyze the numerical behavior and algebraic properties of the systems of linear equations resulting from the sinc discretizations of these special second-order ODE systems. Then the block-diagonal preconditioner is used to accelerate the convergence of the Krylov subspace iteration methods for solving the discretized system of linear equation. Numerical results show that these order-reduced methods are effective for solving the linear third-order ODEs.