Exactly solving some typical Riemann–Liouville fractional models by a general method of separation of variables

Abstract

Finding exact solutions for Riemann–Liouville (RL) fractional equations is very difficult. We propose a general method of separation of variables to study the problem. We obtain several general results and, as applications, we give nontrivial exact solutions for some typical RL fractional equations such as the fractional Kadomtsev–Petviashvili equation and the fractional Langmuir chain equation. In particular, we obtain non-power functions solutions for a kind of RL time-fractional reaction–diffusion equation. In addition, we find that the separation of variables method is more suited to deal with high-dimensional nonlinear RL fractional equations because we have more freedom to choose undetermined functions.