A Jacobi spectral Galerkin method for the integrated forms of fourth‐order elliptic differential equations

This article analyzes the solution of the integrated forms of fourth‐order elliptic differential equations on a rectilinear domain using a spectral Galerkin method. The spatial approximation is based on Jacobi polynomials P (x), with α, β ∈ (?1, ∞) and n the polynomial degree. For α = β, one recovers the ultraspherical polynomials (symmetric Jacobi polynomials) and for α = β = ?½, α = β = 0, the Chebyshev of the first and second kinds and Legendre polynomials respectively; and for the nonsymmetric Jacobi polynomials, the two important special cases α = ?β = ±½ (Chebyshev polynomials of the third and fourth kinds) are also recovered. The two‐dimensional version of the approximations is obtained by tensor products of the one‐dimensional bases. The various matrix systems resulting from these discretizations are carefully investigated, especially their condition number. An algebraic preconditioning yields a condition number of O(N), N being the polynomial degree of approximation, which is an improvement with respect to the well‐known condition number O(N⁸) of spectral methods for biharmonic elliptic operators. The numerical complexity of the solver is proportional to N^d+1 for a d‐dimensional problem. This operational count is the best one can achieve with a spectral method. The numerical results illustrate the theory and constitute a convincing argument for the feasibility of the method. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2009