Collocation for Singular Perturbation Problems I: First Order Systems with Constant Coefficients

ID
TR-81-02
Authors
Uri Ascher and R. Weiss
Publishing date
February 1981
Abstract

The application of collocation methods for the numerical solution of singularly perturbed ordinary differential equations is investigated. Collocation at Gauss, Radau and Lobatto points is considered, for both initial and boundary value problems for first order systems with constant coefficients. Particular attention is paid to symmetric schemes for boundary value problems; these problems may have boundary layers at both interval ends.

Our analysis shows that certain collocation schemes, in particular those based on Gauss or Lobatto points, do perform very well on such problems, provided that a fine mesh with steps proportional to the layers' width is used in the layers only, and a coarse mesh, just fine enough to resolve the solution of the reduced problem, is used in between. Ways to construct appropriate layer meshes are proposed. Of all methods considered, the Lobatto schemes appear to be the most promising class of methods, as they essentially retain their usual superconvergence power for the smooth, reduced solution, whereas Gauss-Legendre schemes do not.

We also investigate the conditioning of the linear systems of equations arizing in the discretization of the boundary value problem. For a row equilibrated version of the discretized system we obtain a pleasantly small bound on the maximum norm condition number, which indicates that these systems can be solved safely by Gaussian elimination with scaled partial pivoting.