Copyright © 2010 Qianqian Yang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Fractional Fokker-Planck equations (FFPEs) have gained much interest recently for describing transport dynamics in complex systems that are governed by anomalous diffusion and nonexponential relaxation patterns. However, effective numerical methods and analytic techniques for the FFPE are still in their embryonic state. In this paper, we consider a class of time-space fractional Fokker-Planck equations with a nonlinear source term (TSFFPENST), which involve the Caputo time fractional derivative (CTFD) of order α∈ (0, 1) and the symmetric Riesz space fractional derivative (RSFD) of order μ∈ (1, 2]. Approximating the CTFD and RSFD using the L1-algorithm and shifted Grünwald method, respectively, a computationally effective numerical method is presented to solve the TSFFPE-NST. The stability and convergence of the proposed numerical method are investigated. Finally, numerical experiments are carried out to support the theoretical claims.