A Family of Sixth-Order Compact Finite-Difference Schemes for the Three-Dimensional Poisson Equation

We derive a family of sixth-order compact finite-difference schemes for the three-dimensional Poisson’s equation. As opposed to other research regarding higher-order compact difference schemes, our approach includes consideration of the discretization of the source function on a compact finite-difference stencil. The schemes derived approximate the solution to Poisson’s equation on a compact stencil, and thus the schemes can be easily implemented and resulting linear systems are solved in a high-performance computing environment. The resulting discretization is a one-parameter family of finite-difference schemes which may be further optimized for accuracy and stability. Computational experiments are implemented which illustrate the theoretically demonstrated truncation errors.