Three dimensional meshfree analysis for time-Caputo and space-Laplacian fractional diffusion equation

Abstract

Numerical exploration of spatial fractional differential equations in three dimensions is not trivial due to their complexity, especially for complicated problem domains. In this work, the time-Caputo and space-Laplacian fractional diffusion equations in three dimensions are analyzed using a meshfree technique. In the temporal dimension, the classical L1 finite difference scheme is used to approach the Caputo fractional derivative. The spatial discretization is realized by a three dimensional reproducing kernel particle method (RKPM), which can eliminate the dependence of shape functions on certain meshes. Therefore RKPM is very suitable to approximate the field variable in complicated three dimensional domains compared with other mesh-dependent methods. For the purpose of increasing the computational efficiency, the stabilized conforming nodal integration (SCNI) and lumped mass matrix techniques are adopted in the Galerkin meshfree formulation. In the proposed method, the tedious derivatives computing for meshfree shape functions, numerical integration for Galerkin weak form and time-consuming inverse calculating for the large size mass matrix are all realized by more efficient approaches comparing with the conventional Galerkin RKPM. Several numerical examples in various domains with structured and unstructured discretization are studied to demonstrate the proposed methodology, and the results show very favorable performance of the proposed method regarding the accuracy and effectiveness.