Copyright © 2012 Changqing Yang and Jianhua Hou. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

A numerical method to solve Lane-Emden equations as singular initial value problems is presented in this work. This method is based on the replacement of unknown functions through a truncated series of hybrid of block-pulse functions and Chebyshev polynomials. The collocation method transforms the differential equation into a system of algebraic equations. It also has application in a wide area of differential equations. Corresponding numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed method.