Verification and error analysis for the simulation of the grain mass aeration process using the method of manufactured solutions

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to present an analytical solution, by means of the method of manufactured solutions (MMS), for the mathematical model that describes the behaviour of the grain mass aeration process, proposed by Thorpe. In contrast to related papers in the literature, several numerical approximations to solve the mathematical model were used. The finite difference method (FDM), employing the spatial approximations given by the methods of Roberts and Weiss, Leith, upwind difference scheme (UDS), central difference scheme (CDS) and UDS with deferred correction (UDS-C), combined with the explicit, implicit and Crank-Nicolson temporal formulations was applied. The effective order of the discretisation error achieved with the refinement of the mesh was verified by performing an error analysis for all approximations used. In addition, the results obtained numerically were compared to the analytical solution and the CPU (central processing unit) times at different levels of refinement. The difference in the CPU time using the methods CDS - Crank-Nicolson, Roberts and Weiss, and Leith, was very small compared to the method widely used in literature, the UDS - Explicit. It was also verified that the errors obtained by the proposed methods were considerably smaller than the error obtained by the UDS - Explicit method. In light of the above, the Leith method is recommended to numerically solve the grain mass aeration model proposed by Thorpe.