TY - JOUR AB - Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to consider the time‐fractional diffusion‐wave equation. The time‐fractional diffusion equation is obtained from the standard diffusion equation by replacing the first‐order time derivative with a fractional derivative of order α ∈ (0, 2]. The fractional derivatives are described in the Caputo sense.Design/methodology/approach– The two methods in applied mathematics can be used as alternative methods for obtaining an analytic and approximate solution for different types of differential equations.Findings– Four examples are presented to show the application of the present techniques. In these schemes, the solution takes the form of a convergent series with easily computable components. The present methods perform extremely well in terms of efficiency and simplicity.Originality/value– In this paper, the variational iteration and homotopy perturbation methods are used to obtain a solution of a fractional diffusion equation. VL - 20 IS - 6 SN - 0961-5539 DO - 10.1108/09615531011056809 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/09615531011056809 AU - Ates¸ I˙nan AU - Yıldırım Ahmet PY - 2010 Y1 - 2010/01/01 TI - Applications of variational iteration and homotopy perturbation methods to obtain exact solutions for time‐fractional diffusion‐wave equations T2 - International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 638 EP - 654 Y2 - 2024/09/19 ER -