Solution of the porous media equation by a compact finite difference method (Q1036490)

Summary: Accurate solutions of the porous media equation that usually occurs in nonlinear problems of heat and mass transfer and in biological systems are obtained using a compact finite difference method in space and a low-storage total variation diminishing third-order Runge-Kutta scheme in time. In the calculation of the numerical derivatives, only a tridiagonal band matrix algorithm is encountered. Therefore, this scheme causes less accumulation of numerical errors and less usage of storage space. The computed results obtained this way are compared with the exact solutions to show the accuracy of the method. The approximate solutions to the equation are computed without transforming the equation and without using linearization. Comparisons indicate that there is a very good agreement between the numerical solutions and the exact solutions in terms of accuracy. This method is seen to be a very good alternative to some existing techniques for such realistic problems.