Copyright © 2012 A. H. Bhrawy and M. A. Alghamdi. 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

A shifted Jacobi Galerkin method is introduced to get a direct solution technique for solving the third- and fifth-order differential equations with constant coefficients subject to initial conditions. The key to the efficiency of these algorithms is to construct appropriate base functions, which lead to systems with specially structured matrices that can be efficiently inverted. A quadrature Galerkin method is introduced for the numerical solution of these problems with variable coefficients. A new shifted Jacobi collocation method based on basis functions satisfying the initial conditions is presented for solving nonlinear initial value problems. Through several numerical examples, we evaluate the accuracy and performance of the proposed algorithms. The algorithms are easy to implement and yield very accurate results.