Shooting methods for 1D steady-state free boundary problems (Q1203712)

This paper considers the use of some simple shooting methods for solving free boundary problems in one dimension of the form \(-u''(x) + q(x)u(x) = f(x)\), \(u(0) = 1\), \(u(s) = u'(s) = 0\), \(q(x) \geq 0\) with \(s\) unknown. The techniques are based on an explicit Runge-Kutta method of order 3 for the time stepping in conjunction with the secant method for computing the free boundary value. Some numerical results are given based on a set of very simple test problems. There is little new in this paper and the difficulties associated with higher dimensional free boundary problems are ignored.