The basic aim of this paper is to develop new numerical algorithms for solving some linear and nonlinear fractional-order differential equations. We have developed a new type of Chebyshev polynomials, namely, Chebyshev polynomials of sixth kind. This type of polynomials is a special class of symmetric orthogonal polynomials, involving four parameters that were constructed with the aid of the extended Sturm–Liouville theorem for symmetric functions. The proposed algorithms are basically built on reducing the fractional-order differential equations with their initial/boundary conditions to systems of algebraic equations which can be efficiently solved. The new proposed algorithms are supported by a detailed study of the convergence and error analysis of the sixth-kind Chebyshev expansion. New connection formulae between Chebyshev polynomials of the second and sixth kinds were established for this study. Some examples were displayed to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms compared to other methods in literature. The proposed algorithms have provided accurate results, even using few terms of the proposed expansion.

It is well known that spectral methods (tau, Galerkin, collocation) have a condition number of O(N4 ) (N is the number of retained modes of polynomial approximations). This paper presents some efficient spectral algorithms, which have a condition number of O(N2 ), based on the ultraspherical-Galerkin methods for second-order elliptic equations in one and two space variables. The key to the efficiency of these algorithms is to construct appropriate base functions, which lead to systems with specially structured matrices that can be efficiently inverted. The complexities of the algorithms are a small multiple of Nd+1 operations for a d-dimensional domain with (N-1)d unknowns, while the convergence rates of the algorithms are exponential for problems with smooth solutions.