LEGENDRE-GAUSS-RADAU SPECTRAL COLLOCATION METHOD FOR NONLINEAR SECOND-ORDER INITIAL VALUE PROBLEMS WITH APPLICATIONS TO WAVE EQUATIONS

We propose and analyze a single-interval Legendre-Gauss-Radau(LGR)spectral collocation method for nonlinear second-order initial value problems of ordinary differential equations.We design an efficient iterative algorithm and prove spectral convergence for the single-interval LGR collocation method.For more effective implementation,we propose a multi-interval LGR spectral collocation scheme,which provides us great flexibility with respect to the local time steps and local approximation degrees.Moreover,we combine the multi-interval LGR collocation method in time with the Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto collocation method in space to obtain a space-time spectral collocation approximation for nonlinear second-order evolution equations.Numerical results show that the proposed methods have high accuracy and excellent long-time stability.Numerical comparison between our methods and several commonly used methods are also provided.