Abstract
In this paper, we propose a semi-implicit difference scheme for solving one-dimensional nonlinear space-fractional diffusion equations. The method is first-order accurate in time and second-order accurate in space. It uses a fractional central difference formula and the backward Euler method to approximate its space and time derivatives, respectively. Stability and convergence properties of the proposed scheme are proved with the help of a discrete Grönwall inequality. Moreover, we extend the method to the solution of two-dimensional nonlinear models. A fast matrix-free implementation based on preconditioned Krylov subspace methods is presented for solving the discretized linear systems. The resulting fast preconditioned semi-implicit difference scheme reduces the memory requirement of conventional semi-implicit difference schemes from O(N2s) to O(Ns) and the computational complexity from O(N3s) to O(NslogNs) in each iterative step, where Ns is the number of space grid points. Experiments with two numerical examples are shown to support the theoretical findings and to illustrate the efficiency of our proposed method.