Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The study of nonlocal transport in physically relevant systems requires the formulation of mathematically well-posed and physically meaningful nonlocal models in bounded spatial domains. The main problem faced by nonlocal partial differential equations in general, and fractional diffusion models in particular, resides in the treatment of the boundaries. For example, the naive truncation of the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative in a bounded domain is in general singular at the boundaries and, as a result, the incorporation of generic, physically meaningful boundary conditions is not feasible. In this presentation we discuss alternatives to address the problem of boundaries in fractional diffusion models. Our main goal is to present models that are both mathematically well posed and physically meaningful. Following the formal construction of the models we present finite-different methods to evaluate the proposed non-local operators in bounded domains.