Noise in initial conditions from measurement errors can create unwanted
oscillations which propagate in numerical solutions. We present a technique of
prohibiting such oscillation errors when solving initial-boundary-value
problems of semilinear diffusion equations. Symmetric Strang splitting is
applied to the equation for solving the linear diffusion and nonlinear
remainder separately. An oscillation-free scheme is developed for overcoming
any oscillatory behavior when numerically solving the linear diffusion portion.
To demonstrate the ills of stable oscillations, we compare our method using a
weighted implicit Euler scheme to the Crank-Nicolson method. The
oscillation-free feature and stability of our method are analyzed through a
local linearization. The accuracy of our oscillation-free method is proved and
its usefulness is further verified through solving a Fisher-type equation where
oscillation-free solutions are successfully produced in spite of random errors
in the initial conditions.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figure
