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Second-order accurate Dirichlet boundary conditions for linear nonlocal diffusion problems. (English) Zbl 1499.34142

Summary: We present an approach to handle Dirichlet type nonlocal boundary conditions for nonlocal diffusion models with a finite range of nonlocal interactions. Our approach utilizes a linear extrapolation of prescribed boundary data. A novelty is, instead of using local gradients of the boundary data that are not available a priori, we incorporate nonlocal gradient operators into the formulation to generalize the finite differences-based methods which are pervasive in literature; our particular choice of the nonlocal gradient operator is based on the interplay between a constant kernel function and the geometry of nonlocal interaction neighborhoods. Such an approach can be potentially useful to address similar issues in peridynamics, smoothed particle hydrodynamics and other nonlocal models. We first show the well-posedness of the newly formulated nonlocal problems and then analyze their asymptotic convergence to the local limit as the nonlocality parameter shrinks to zero. We justify the second-order localization rate, which is the optimal order attainable in the absence of physical boundaries.

MSC:

34B10 Nonlocal and multipoint boundary value problems for ordinary differential equations
35A01 Existence problems for PDEs: global existence, local existence, non-existence
35B40 Asymptotic behavior of solutions to PDEs
45A05 Linear integral equations
60K50 Anomalous diffusion models (subdiffusion, superdiffusion, continuous-time random walks, etc.)
65N12 Stability and convergence of numerical methods for boundary value problems involving PDEs
74A70 Peridynamics