High-order difference potentials methods for 1D elliptic type models

Abstract Numerical approximations and modeling of many physical, biological, and biomedical problems often deal with equations with highly varying coefficients, heterogeneous models (described by different types of partial differential equations (PDEs) in different domains), and/or have to take into consideration the complex structure of the computational subdomains. The major challenge here is to design an efficient numerical method that can capture certain properties of analytical solutions in different domains/subdomains (such as positivity, different regularity/smoothness of the solutions, etc.), while handling the arbitrary geometries and complex structures of the domains. In this work, we employ one-dimensional elliptic type models as the starting point to develop and numerically test high-order accurate Difference Potentials Method (DPM) for variable coefficient elliptic problems in heterogeneous media. While the method and analysis are simple in the one-dimensional settings, they illustrate and test several important ideas and capabilities of the developed approach.