Contractivity of θ‐method for semi‐discrete systems

Abstract

We consider nonlinear semi-discrete problems that derive by reaction diffusion systems of partial differential equations, when finite difference methods or Faedo Galerkin methods are used for spatial discretization. The aim of this article is to give sufficient conditions for the contractivity of the θ-method, in a norm generated by a positive diagonal matrix G. We show that the numerical contractivity property is obtained if some matrices, constructed by means of the Jacobian matrix of nonlinear term, are M-matrices. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.