SUPERCONVERGENCE OF SOME PROJECTION APPROXIMATIONS FOR WEAKLY SINGULAR INTEGRAL EQUATIONS USING GENERAL GRIDS

This paper deals with superconvergence phenomena in general grids when projection-based approximations are used for solving Fredholm integral equations of the second kind with weakly singular kernels. Four variants of the Galerkin method are considered. They are the classical Galerkin method, the iterated Galerkin method, the Kantorovich method, and the iterated Kantorovich method. It is proved that the iterated Kantorovich approximation exhibits the best superconvergence rate if the right-hand side of the integral equation is nonsmooth. All error estimates are derived for an arbitrary grid without any uniformity or quasi-uniformity condition on it, and are formulated in terms of the data without any additional assumption on the solution. Numerical examples concern the equation governing transfer of photons in stellar atmospheres. The numerical results illustrate the fact that the error estimates proposed in the different theorems are quite sharp, and confirm the superiority of the iterated Kantorovich scheme.