Purpose: The main purpose of this work is the development of a numerical algorithm based on modified cubic trigonometric B-spline functions for computational modelling of hyperbolic-type wave equations. These types of equations describe a variety of physical models in the vibrations of structures, nonlinear optics, quantum field theory and solid-state physics, etc. Design/methodology/approach: Dirichlet boundary conditions cannot be handled easily by cubic trigonometric B-spline functions. Then, a modification is made in cubic trigonometric B-spline functions to handle the Dirichlet boundary conditions and a numerical algorithm is developed. The proposed algorithm reduced the hyperbolic-type wave equations into a system of first-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs) in time variable. Then, stability-preserving SSP-RK54 scheme and the Thomas algorithm are used to solve the obtained system. The stability of the algorithm is also discussed. Findings: A different technique based on modified cubic trigonometric B-spline functions is proposed which is quite different from the schemes developed (Abbas et al., 2014; Nazir et al., 2016) and depicts the computational modelling of hyperbolic-type wave equations. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this technique is novel for solving hyperbolic-type wave equations and the developed algorithm is free from quasi-linearization process and finite difference operators for time derivatives. This algorithm gives better results than the results discussed in literature (Dehghan and Shokri, 2008; Batiha et al., 2007; Mittal and Bhatia, 2013; Jiwari, 2015).

We prove existence of a positive solution for a system of non-variational bi-harmonic equations. Furthermore, we give some a priori estimates of solutions and a non-existence result. In addition we compute numerical solutions to illustrate the theoretical results.