2012/06/04 by K. B. Nakshatrala, Nakshatrala, K. B., Harsha Nagarajan +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · Mathematics · #Advanced Mathematical Modeling in Engineering #Advanced Numerical Methods in Computational Mathematics #FOS: Mathematics #Numerical Analysis (math.NA) #Numerical methods for differential equations
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1206.0701
openalex publication_date 2012/06/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Transient diffusion equations arise in many branches of engineering and applied sciences (e.g., heat transfer and mass transfer), and are parabolic partial differential equations. It is well-known that, under certain assumptions on the input data, these equations satisfy important mathematical properties like maximum principles and the non-negative constraint, which have implications in mathematical modeling. However, existing numerical formulations for these types of equations do not, in general, satisfy maximum principles and the non-negative constraint. In this paper, we present a methodology for enforcing maximum principles and the non-negative constraint for transient anisotropic diffusion equation. The method of horizontal lines (also known as the Rothe method) is applied in which the time is discretized first. This results in solving steady anisotropic diffusion equation with decay equation at every discrete time level. The proposed methodology for transient anisotropic diffusion equation will satisfy maximum principles and the non-negative constraint on general computational grids, and with no additional restrictions on the time step. We illustrate the performance and accuracy of the proposed formulation using representative numerical examples. We also perform numerical convergence of the proposed methodology. For comparison, we also present the results from the standard single-field semi-discrete formulation and the results from a popular software package, which all will violate maximum principles and the non-negative constraint.