Unconditional stability of alternating difference schemes with intrinsic parallelism for the fourth-order parabolic equation

In this paper, the difference method with intrinsic parallelism for the fourth-order parabolic equation is studied. The general alternating difference schemes are constructed and proved to be unconditionally stable. The alternating group explicit scheme, alternating segment explicit–implicit scheme and alternating segment Crank–Nicolson scheme are the special cases of the general schemes constructed here. Numerical results are presented to examine the convergence, stability and accuracy of the general schemes.