High-Order Spectral Scheme with Structure Maintenance and Fast Memory Algorithm for Nonlocal Nonlinear Diffusion Equations

We develop a fast numerical method for solving nonlinear diffusion equations with memory phenomena, a class of problems arising within viscoelastic materials, anomalous transport, and hereditary systems. The primary computational problem is the nonlocal temporal dependence captured by Volterra-type memory operators, which makes direct evaluation scale quadratically with the number of time steps (O(Nt2)), rendering prolonged simulations prohibitively expensive. To address this bottleneck, we develop a novel synthesis that combines a high-order spectral method for spatial discretization with a fast memory algorithm based on a sum-of-exponentials approximation. The spectral method obtains exponential spatial convergence for smooth solutions. At the same time, the fast memory algorithm reduces memory usage and computational complexity to O(Nt), yielding computational speedups exceeding 414x for prolonged simulations. We rigorously prove that the proposed scheme preserves the discrete energy dissipation law of the continuous system under mild assumptions on the memory kernel, thereby ensuring unconditional stability. Error analysis verifies spectral accuracy in space and first-order temporal convergence. Extensive numerical experiments using exponentially decaying and weakly singular kernels validate the theoretical results and illustrate the method’s effectiveness for modeling viscoelastic transport phenomena and irregular diffusion in complex systems.