A nonlinearity lagging for the solution of nonlinear steady state reaction diffusion problems

This paper concerns with the analysis of the iterative procedure for the solution of a nonlinear reaction diffusion equation at the steady state in a two dimensional bounded domain supplemented by suitable boundary conditions. This procedure, called Lagged Diffusivity Functional Iteration (LDFI)-procedure, computes the solution by “lagging” the diffusion term. A model problem is considered and a finite difference discretization for that model problem is described. Furthermore, properties of the finite difference operator are proved. Then, sufficient conditions for the convergence of the LDFI-procedure are given. At each stage of the LDFI-procedure a weakly nonlinear algebraic system has to be solved and the simplified Newton–Arithmetic Mean (Newton–AM) method is used. This method is particularly well suited for implementation on parallel computers. Numerical studies show the efficiency, for different test functions, of the LDFI-procedure combined with the simplified Newton–AM method. Better results are obtained when in the reaction diffusion equation also a convection term is present.