Finite element solution of diffusion problems with irregular data

Summary Diffusion problems occuring in practice often involve irregularities in the initial or boundary data resulting in a local break-down of the solution's regularity. This may drastically reduce the accuracy of discretization schemes over the whole interval of integration, unless certain precautions are taken. The diagonal Padé schemes of order 2, combined with a standard finite element discretization, usually require an unnatural step size restriction in order to achieve even locally optimal accuracy. It is shown here that this restriction can be avoided by means of a sample damping procedure which preserves the order of the discretization and, in the case =1, does not increase the costs.