NUMERICAL METHOD FOR SINGULARLY PERTURBED THIRD ORDER ORDINARY DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS OF REACTION-DIFFUSION TYPE

Abstract

In this paper, we have proposed a numerical method for Singularly Perturbed Boundary Value Problems (SPBVPs) of reaction-diffusion type of third order Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). The SPBVP is reduced into a weakly coupled system of one first order and one second order ODEs, one without the parameter and the other with the parameter <TEX>${\varepsilon}$</TEX> multiplying the highest derivative subject to suitable initial and boundary conditions, respectively. The numerical method combines boundary value technique, asymptotic expansion approximation, shooting method and finite difference scheme. The weakly coupled system is decoupled by replacing one of the unknowns by its zero-order asymptotic expansion. Finally the present numerical method is applied to the decoupled system. In order to get a numerical solution for the derivative of the solution, the domain is divided into three regions namely two inner regions and one outer region. The Shooting method is applied to two inner regions whereas for the outer region, standard finite difference (FD) scheme is applied. Necessary error estimates are derived for the method. Computational efficiency and accuracy are verified through numerical examples. The method is easy to implement and suitable for parallel computing. The main advantage of this method is that due to decoupling the system, the computation time is very much reduced.