Abstract
The space-time fractional diffusion-wave equation (FDWE) is a generalization of classical diffusion and wave equations which is used in modeling practical phenomena of diffusion and wave in fluid flow, oil strata and others. This paper reports an accurate spectral tau method for solving the two-sided space and time Caputo FDWE with various types of nonhomogeneous boundary conditions. The proposed method is based on shifted Legendre tau (SLT) procedure in conjunction with the shifted Legendre operational matrices of Riemann-Liouville fractional integral, left-sided and right-sided fractional derivatives. We focus primarily on implementing this algorithm in both temporal and spatial discretizations. In addition, convergence analysis is provided theoretically for the Dirichlet boundary conditions, along with graphical analysis for several special cases using other conditions. These suggest that the Legendre Tau method converges exponentially provided that the data in the given FDWE are smooth. Finally, several numerical examples are given to demonstrate the high accuracy of the proposed method.