A boundedness-preserving finite-difference scheme for a damped nonlinear wave equation

In this work, we present a non-standard finite-difference scheme to approximate solutions of a damped, hyperbolic partial differential equation with nonlinear reaction which follows a generalized logistic form. Our mathematical model is a hyperbolic generalization of the classical Fisher-Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piscounov equation from population dynamics, where the damping term has a constant coefficient; both zero Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions are considered. Under certain conditions of the model and the computational parameters, the method is able to preserve the positivity and the boundedness of the solutions of the mathematical model, as evidenced both theoretically (via techniques of matrix algebra which provide sufficient conditions on the positivity and the boundedness of the technique) and computationally (via numerical simulations). The validity of the method is tested against known exact solutions of the parabolic and the hyperbolic regimes, obtaining an excellent agreement between the analytical and numerical results. (C) 2010 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.