New Numerical Approximations for Space-time Fractional Burgers’ Equations via a Legendre Spectral-collocation Method

Burgers’ equation is a fundamental partial differential equation in fluid mechanics. This paper reports a new space-time spectral algorithm for obtaining an approximate solution for the space-time fractional Burgers’ equation (FBE) based on spectral shifted Legendre collocation (SLC) method in combination with the shifted Legendre operational matrix of fractional derivatives. The fractional derivatives are described in the Caputo sense. We propose a spectral shifted Legendre collocation method in both temporal and spatial discretizations for the space-time FBE. The main characteristic behind this approach is that it reduces such problem to that of solving a system of nonlinear algebraic equations that can then be solved using Newton’s iterative method. Numerical results with comparisons are given to confirm the reliability of the proposed method for FBE.