An analysis of the linear advection–diffusion equation using mesh-free and mesh-dependent methods

Abstract

The numerical solution of advection–diffusion equations has been a long standing problem and many numerical methods that attempt to find stable and accurate solutions have to resort to artificial methods to stabilize the solution. In this paper, we present a meshless method based on thin plate radial basis functions (RBF). The efficiency of the method in terms of computational processing time, accuracy and stability is discussed. The results are compared with the findings from the dual reciprocity/boundary element and finite difference methods as well as the analytical solution. Our analysis shows that the RBFs method, with its simple implementation, generates excellent results and speeds up the computational processing time, independent of the shape of the domain and irrespective of the dimension of the problem.