Temporal second-order fully discrete two-grid methods for nonlinear time-fractional variable coefficient diffusion-wave equations

This paper proposes a temporal second-order fully discrete two-grid finite element method (FEM) for solving nonlinear time-fractional variable coefficient diffusion-wave equations. The method involves introducing an auxiliary variable and utilizing a reducing order technique for the fractional derivative. This reduces the original fractional wave equations to a coupled system consisting of two equations with lower order derivative in time. The time-fractional derivative is discretized using the L2-1σ formula, while a second-order scheme is used for discretizing the first-order time derivative. The spatial direction is discretized using an efficient two-grid Galerkin FEM. The paper demonstrates that the optimal error estimates in L2-norm and H1-norm of the two-grid methods can achieve optimal convergence order when the mesh size satisfies H=h12 and H=hr2r+2, respectively. To handle the initial singularity of the solution and the historical memory of the fractional derivative term, the paper presents the nonuniform and fast two-grid algorithms. The numerical results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-grid methods.