A new fourth-order compact finite difference method for solving Lane-Emden-Fowler type singular boundary value problems

Abstract

We develop a novel fourth-order compact finite difference scheme to solve nonlinear singular ordinary differential equations. Such problems occur in many fields of science and engineering, such as studying the equilibrium of an isothermal gas sphere, reaction–diffusion in a spherical permeable catalyst, etc. These problems are challenging to solve because of their singularity or nonlinearity. By our proposed method, we can easily solve these complex problems without removing or modifying the singularity. To construct the new fourth-order compact difference method, Initially, we created a uniform mesh within the solution domain and developed a compact finite difference scheme. This scheme approximates the derivatives at the boundary nodal points to handle the problem’s singularity effectively. Employing a matrix analysis approach, we discussed the convergence analysis of the methods. To demonstrate its efficacy, we apply our approach to solve various real-life problems from the literature. The new method offers high-order accuracy with minimal grid points and provides better numerical results than the nonstandard finite difference method and exponential compact finite difference method.