Novel fitted operator finite difference methods for singularly perturbed elliptic convection–diffusion problems in two dimensions

Abstract

We consider a class of singularly perturbed elliptic problems posed on a unit square. These problems are solved by using fitted mesh methods by many researchers but no attempts are made to solve them using fitted operator methods, except our recent work on reaction–diffusion problems [J.B. Munyakazi and K.C. Patidar, Higher order numerical methods for singularly perturbed elliptic problems, Neural Parallel Sci. Comput. 18(1) (2010), pp. 75–88]. In this paper, we design two fitted operator finite difference methods (FOFDMs) for singularly perturbed convection–diffusion problems which possess solutions with exponential and parabolic boundary layers, respectively. We observe that both of these FOFDMs are ϵ-uniformly convergent. This fact contradicts the claim about singularly perturbed convection–diffusion problems [Miller et al. Fitted Numerical Methods for Singular Perturbation Problems, World Scientific, Singapore, 1996] that ‘when parabolic boundary layers are present, …, it is not possible to design an ϵ-uniform FOFDM if the mesh is restricted to being a uniform mesh’. We confirm our theoretical findings through computational investigations and also found that we obtain better results than those of Linß and Stynes [Appl. Numer. Math. 31 (1999), pp. 255–270].