A fourth order accurate numerical method for non-linear time fractional reaction diffusion equation on a bounded domain

In the present work, a high-order numerical scheme is proposed and analyzed to solve the non-linear time fractional reaction–diffusion equation (RDE) of order α∈(0,1). The numerical scheme consists of a time-stepping cubic approximation for the time fractional derivative and a compact finite difference scheme to approximate the spatial derivative. After applying these approximations to time fractional RDE, we get a non-linear system of equations. An iterative algorithm is formulated to solve the obtained nonlinear discrete system. We analyze the unique solvability of the proposed compact finite difference scheme and discuss the stability using von Neumann analysis. Further, we prove that the scheme is convergent in the Euclidean norm with the convergence order 4−α in the temporal direction and 4 in the spatial direction using matrix analysis. Finally, the numerical experimentation is performed to demonstrate the authenticity of the proposed numerical scheme.