Spectral Schemes on Triangular Elements

The Poisson problem with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions is considered on a triangle. The transformation from square to triangle is realized by mapping an edge of the square onto a corner of the triangle. Then standard Chebyshev collocation techniques can be implemented. Numerical experiments demonstrate the expected high spectral accuracy for smooth solutions. Furthermore, it is shown that finite difference preconditioning can be successfully employed to construct an efficient iterative solver. Then the convection–diffusion equation is considered. Here finite difference preconditioning with central differences leads to instability. However, using the first-order upstream scheme, we obtain a stable method. Finally, a domain decomposition technique is applied to the patching of rectangular and triangular elements.