Convergence analysis of higher-order approximation of singularly perturbed 2D semilinear parabolic PDEs with non-homogeneous boundary conditions

This article focuses on developing and analyzing an efficient higher-order numerical approximation of singularly perturbed two-dimensional semilinear parabolic convection-diffusion problems with time-dependent boundary conditions. We approximate the governing nonlinear problem by an implicit fitted mesh method (FMM), which combines an alternating direction implicit scheme in the temporal direction together with a higher-order finite difference scheme in the spatial directions. Since the solution possesses exponential boundary layers, a Cartesian product of piecewise-uniform Shishkin meshes is used to discretize in space. To begin our analysis, we establish the stability corresponding to the continuous nonlinear problem, and obtain a-priori bounds for the solution derivatives. Thereafter, we pursue the stability analysis of the discrete problem, and prove ε-uniform convergence in the maximum-norm. Next, for enhancement of the temporal accuracy, we use the Richardson extrapolation technique solely in the temporal direction. In addition, we investigate the order reduction phenomenon naturally occurring due to the time-dependent boundary data and propose a suitable approximation to tackle this effect. Finally, we present the computational results to validate the theoretical estimates.