Inverting the variable fractional order in a variable-order space-fractional diffusion equation with variable diffusivity: analysis and simulation

Abstract

Variable-order space-fractional diffusion equations provide very competitive modeling capabilities of challenging phenomena, including anomalously superdiffusive transport of solutes in heterogeneous porous media, long-range spatial interactions and other applications, as well as eliminating the nonphysical boundary layers of the solutions to their constant-order analogues. In this paper, we prove the uniqueness of determining the variable fractional order of the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary-value problem of the one-sided linear variable-order space-fractional diffusion equation with some observed values of the unknown solutions near the boundary of the spatial domain. We base on the analysis to develop a spectral-Galerkin Levenberg–Marquardt method and a finite difference Levenberg–Marquardt method to numerically invert the variable order. We carry out numerical experiments to investigate the numerical performance of these methods.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Nov 10, 2020
Source ID
10.1515/jiip-2019-0040

Entities

People

  • Hong Wang
  • Jin Cheng
  • Xiangcheng Zheng
  • Yiqun Li

Organizations

  • Army Research Office
  • Fudan University
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China
  • National Science Foundation
  • University of South Carolina

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)

Technology Areas

  • Space