Radial basis collocation method and quasi-Newton iteration for nonlinear elliptic problems

This work presents a radial basis collocation method combined with the quasi-Newton iteration method for solving semilinear elliptic partial differential equations. The main result in this study is that there exists an exponential convergence rate in the radial basis collocation discretization and a superlinear convergence rate in the quasi-Newton iteration of the nonlinear partial differential equations. In this work, the numerical error associated with the employed quadrature rule is considered. It is shown that the errors in Sobolev norms for linear elliptic partial differential equations using radial basis collocation method are bounded by the truncation error of the RBF. The combined errors due to radial basis approximation, quadrature rules, and quasi-Newton and Newton iterations are also presented. This result can be extended to finite element or finite difference method combined with any iteration methods discussed in this work. The numerical example demonstrates a good agreement between numerical results and analytical predictions. The numerical results also show that although the convergence rate of order 1.62 of the quasi-Newton iteration scheme is slightly slower than rate of order 2 in the Newton iteration scheme, the former is more stable and less sensitive to the initial guess. (C) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.