Spectral collocation and radial basis function methods for one-dimensional interface problems

Differential equations with singular sources or discontinuous coefficients yield non-smooth or even discontinuous solutions. This problem is known as the interface problem. High-order numerical solutions suffer from the Gibbs phenomenon in that the accuracy deteriorates if the discontinuity is not properly treated. In this work, we use the spectral and radial basis function methods and present a least squares collocation method to solve the interface problem for one-dimensional elliptic equations. The domain is decomposed into multiple sub-domains; in each sub-domain, the collocation solution is sought. The solution should satisfy more conditions than the given conditions associated with the differential equations, which makes the problem over-determined. To solve the over-determined system, the least squares method is adopted. For the spectral method, the weighted norm method with different scaling factors and the mixed formulation are used. For the radial basis function method, the weighted shape parameter method is presented. Numerical results show that the least squares collocation method provides an accurate solution with high efficacy and that better accuracy is obtained with the spectral method. (C) 2011 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.