A new numerical approach to the solution of PDEs with optimal accuracy on irregular domains and Cartesian meshes—part 2: numerical simulations and comparison with FEM

Abstract

A new numerical approach for the time-dependent wave and heat equations as well as for the time-independent Poisson equation developed in Part 1 is applied to the simulation of 1-D and 2-D test problems on regular and irregular domains. Trivial conforming and non-conforming Cartesian meshes with 3-point stencils in the 1-D case and 9-point stencils in the 2-D case are used in calculations. The numerical solutions of the 1-D wave equation as well as the 2-D wave and heat equations for a simple rectangular plate show that the accuracy of the new approach on non-conforming meshes is practically the same as that on conforming meshes for both the Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. Moreover, very small distances ( $$0.1 h - 10^{-9}h$$ where h is the grid size) between the grid points of a Cartesian mesh and the boundary do not decrease the accuracy of the new technique. The application of the new approach to the 2-D problems on an irregular domain shows that the order of accuracy is close to four for the wave and heat equations and is close to five for the Poisson equation. This is in agreement with the theoretical results of Part 1 of the paper. The comparison of the numerical results obtained by the new approach and by FEM shows that at similar 9-point stencils, the accuracy of the new approach on irregular domains is two orders higher for the wave and heat equations and three orders higher for the Poisson equation than that for the linear finite elements. Moreover, the new approach yields even much more accurate results than the quadratic and cubic finite elements with much wider stencils. An example of a problem with a complex irregular domain that requires a prohibitively large computation time with the finite elements but can be easily solved with the new approach is presented.