Finite Element Method on locally refined composite meshes for Dirichlet fractional Laplacian

It is known that the solution of the Dirichlet fractional Laplacian in a bounded domain exhibits singular behavior near the boundary. Consequently, numerical discretizations on quasi-uniform meshes lead to low accuracy and nonphysical solutions. We adopt a finite element discretization on locally refined composite meshes, which consist in a combination of graded meshes near the singularity and uniform meshes where the solution is smooth. We also provide a reference strategy on parameter selection of locally refined composite meshes. Numerical tests confirm that finite element method on locally refined composite meshes has higher accuracy than uniform meshes, but the computational cost is less than that of graded meshes. Our method is applied to discrete the fractional-in-space Allen–Cahn equation and the fractional Burgers equation with Dirichlet fractional Laplacian, some new observations are discovered from our numerical results.