Circular grid solution for Laplace's equation in two dimensions

In the design of a building envelope, there is the issue of heat flow through the partitions. In the heat flow process, we distinguish steady and dynamic states in which heat fluxes need to be obtained as part of building physics calculations. This article describes the issue of determining the size of those heat fluxes. The search for the temperature field in a two-dimensional problem is common in building physics and heat exchange in general. Both numerical and analytical methods can be used to obtain a solution. Two methods were dealt with, the first of which was used to obtain the solution in the steady state and the other in the transient. In the steady state a method of initial functions, the basics of which were given by W.Z. Vlasov and A.Y. Lur’e was adopted. Originally MIF was used for analysis of the loads of a flat elastic medium. Since then it was used for solving concrete beams, plates and composite materials problems. Polynomial half-reverse solutions are used in the theory of a continuous medium. Here solutions were obtained by the direct method. As a result, polynomial forms of the considered temperature field were obtained. A Cartesian coordinate system and rectangular shape of the plate were assumed. The problem is governed by the Laplace equation in the steady state and Poisson in the transient state. Boundary conditions in the form of temperature (τ(x), t(y)) or/and flux (p(x), q(y)) can be provided. In the steady state the solution T(x, y) was assumed in the form of an infinite power series developed in relation to the variable y with coefficients Cn depending on x. The assumed solution was substituted into the Fourier equation and after expanding into the Taylor series the boundary condition for y = 0 and y = h was taken into account. From this condition the coefficient Cn can be calculated and, therefore, a closed solution for the temperature field in the plate.

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) on infinite domains has been a challenging task in physical simulations and geometry processing. We introduce a general technique to transform a PDE problem on an unbounded domain to a PDE problem on a bounded domain. Our method uses the Kelvin Transform, which essentially inverts the distance from the origin. However, naive application of this coordinate mapping can still result in a singularity at the origin in the transformed domain. We show that by factoring the desired solution into the product of an analytically known (asymptotic) component and another function to solve for, the problem can be made continuous and compact, with solutions significantly more efficient and well-conditioned than traditional finite element and Monte Carlo numerical PDE methods on stretched coordinates. Specifically, we show that every Poisson or Laplace equation on an infinite domain is transformed to another Poisson (Laplace) equation on a compact region. In other words, any existing Poisson solver on a bounded domain is readily an infinite domain Poisson solver after being wrapped by our transformation. We demonstrate the integration of our method with finite difference and Monte Carlo PDE solvers, with applications in the fluid pressure solve and simulating electromagnetism, including visualizations of the solar magnetic field. Our transformation technique also applies to the Helmholtz equation whose solutions oscillate out to infinity. After the transformation, the Helmholtz equation becomes a tractable equation on a bounded domain without infinite oscillation. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the Helmholtz equation on an infinite domain is solved on a bounded grid without requiring an artificial absorbing boundary condition.

This paper describes an efficient method for both time- and frequency-domain solutions of electromagnetic (EM) field problems. In this method EM field problems are formulated using Laplace-domain finite element approach and are solved using complex frequency hopping (CFH) technique. CFH is a moment-matching technique which has been used successfully in the circuit simulation area for solution of large set of ordinary differential equations. Problems consisting of Dirichlet, Neumann and combined boundary conditions can be solved using the proposed algorithm to obtain both time and frequency responses. Several electromagnetic field problems have been studied using the new technique and the speed-up advantage (one to three orders of magnitude) compared to conventional finite element technique is demonstrated. A good agreement between numerical results obtained using the proposed method and the previously published results has been found.

The boundary element method (BEM) is an efficient numerical method that approximates solutions of various boundary value problems. Despite its success little research has been performed on the conditioning of the linear systems that appear in the BEM. For a Laplace equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions a remarkable phenomenon is observed; the corresponding boundary integral equation (BIE) is singular for a certain critical size of the 2D domain. As a consequence the discrete counterpart of the BIE, the linear system, is singular too, or at least ill-conditioned. This is reflected by the condition number of the system matrix, which is infinitely large, or at least very large. When the condition number of the BEM-matrix is large, the linear system is difficult to solve and the solution of the system is very sensible to perturbations in the boundary data. For a Laplace equation with mixed boundary conditions a similar phenomenon is observed. The corresponding BEM-matrix consists of two blocks; one block originates from the BEM-matrix belonging to the Dirichlet problem, the other block originates from the BEM-matrix belonging to the Neumann problem. The composite matrix inherits the solvability problems from the Dirichlet block. In other words, for the Laplace equation with mixed boundary conditions there exists also a critical size of the 2D domain for which the BEM-matrix has an infinitely large condition number. Hence the size and shape of the domain affects the solvability of the BEM problem. The critical size of the domain for which the BIE becomes singular is related to the logarithmic capacity of the domain. The logarithmic capacity is a positive real number that is a function of the size and shape of the domain. If this logarithmic capacity is equal to one, the domain is a critical domain, and for this domain the BIE becomes singular. Thus by computing the logarithmic capacity we can a-priori determine whether the BIE will be singular or not. The logarithmic capacity depends linearly on the scale of the domain, and thus a domain with logarithmic capacity equal to one can always be found by rescaling the domain. Unfortunately the logarithmic capacity can only be computed analytically for a few simple domains; for more involved domains the logarithmic capacity can be estimated though. There are several possibilities to avoid large condition numbers, i.e. singular BIEs that appear at critical domains. The first option is to rescale the domain such that the logarithmic capacity is unequal to one. One can also add a supplementary condition to the BIE and the linear system. A drawback of this option is that the linear system has more equations than unknowns and different techniques are required to solve the system. A third option is to slightly modify the fundamental solution of the Laplace operator. This fundamental solution directly appears in the BIE and it can be shown that a suitable modification yields BIEs that do not become singular. The critical domains for which the BIEs become singular do not restrict to Laplace equations only. Also for BIEs applied to the biharmonic equation or the elastostatic equations and the Stokes equations such critical domains exist. As the last two equations are vectorial equations, also the corresponding BIE consists of two equations. As a consequence two critical domains can be found for which these BIEs become singular. To obtain nonsingular BIEs techniques similar to the Laplace case can be used. Unfortunately we cannot a-priori determine the sizes for which the BIEs becomes singular, and thus do not know to what size we should rescale the domain to obtain nonsingular BIEs. The existence of critical domains is in essence caused by the logarithmic term in the fundamental solutions for the elliptic boundary value problems in 2D. This logarithmic term does not depend linearly on the size of the domain. When a domain is scaled, i.e. multiplied by a scale factor, the argument of the logarithm is also multiplied by this scale factor, but the logarithm turns this into an additive term. Thus the logarithm transforms multiplication into addition. This affects the BIEs in such a way that critical domains can appear. The fundamental solutions of boundary value problems in 3D do not contain a logarithmic term. Hence scaling of the domain does not affect the fundamental solution, and consequently also the BIE is not affected. Hence we may safely rescale 3D domains without the risk to encounter a critical domain. An example in which a domain takes many different sizes and shapes is the blowing problem. In this problem a viscous fluid is blown to a desired shape. Typically the time is discretised into a set of discrete time steps, and at each step the shape of the fluid is computed by solving the Stokes equations. When attempting to simulate this problem in 2D, we meet a large number of 2D domains, and we risk that one of these domains is equal to or approaches a critical domain. In such a case the BEM will have difficulties with solving the Stokes equations for that particular domain. When simulating the blowing problem in 3D, no critical domains are encountered. It turns out that the BEM is a very efficient numerical method for this particular 3D problem with a moving boundary. As we are merely interested in the shape of the fluid, we only need to know the flow of its boundary. The BEM does exactly that; it does not compute the flow at the interior of the fluid. Furthermore it is rather easy to include other effects from the blowing problem in the model, such as gravity, surface tension and friction from the contact of the fluid with a wall. As only the boundary of the fluid is discretised, the system matrices that appear in the BEM are smaller than the system matrices that appear when solving the problem with a finite element method, for example. Though the BEM-matrices are dense, while the finite element matrices are sparse, the computational effort for the BEM is relatively low. In short, the BEMis a very appropriate numerical method when solving blowing problems.

We study the numerical behaviour and the relationships between some numerical methods derived from the Mixed Finite Element (MFE) formulation and from the Control Volume formulation using the Multi-Point Flux Approximation (MPFA) of Aavatsmark et al. (1996). All methods are locally mass conservative and are well suited to solve the flow problem for both steady state (elliptic case) an transient (parabolic case) on a general irregular grid with anisotropic and heterogeneous discontinuous coefficients. Hybridization of the standard MFE method allows to obtain a symmetric positive definite system which is not, in general, an M-matrix. Moreover, the mixed hybrid finite element method uses more unknowns (one per edge or face) than the finite volume formulation (one per element). On the other hand, for a general element grid, the MPFA method does not give a symmetric matrix of coefficients and monotonicity issues are known to arise for high aspect ratios combined with skewed of computational grids. In this work, we propose two variants of the MFE method: (i) the lumped-MFE method, based on the equivalence between MHFE method and the P1-nonconforming Galerkin method for the Laplace equation and (ii) the multipoint-MFE method based on Multipoint finite volume discretization using the framework of the modified mixed finite element space. We discuss connections between the different approaches and perform numerical experiments for both steady state and transient cases to compare (number of unknowns, matrix properties, condition number) and study the numerical behaviour of these methods (unphysical oscillations, CPU time).

Numerical solution of an inverse steady state heat conduction problem

Development of a new approach to simulate a particle track under electrochemical etching in polymeric detectors

SynopsisIn this paper we examine the general paraboloidal co-ordinate system, in which the normal surfaces are elliptic or hyperbolic paraboloids, including as special cases the “parabolic plate” and the “plate with a parabolic hole”. We then show that normal solutions of Laplace's equation in these co-ordinates are given as products of three Mathieu functions, and apply this to the solution of boundary-value problems for Laplace's equation in these co-ordinates. In a subsequent paper the corresponding treatment of the wave equation will be given.

This paper investigates the numerical computation of a Cauchy problem for Laplace's equation which is a typical ill-posed problem. By using Green's formula, the problem is transformed to a moment problem. For numerical computation of the moment problem, an error estimation and several numerical examples for verification are presented. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the solution of the Cauchy problems for Laplace's equation in two-dimension are also given.

Generalized HPC method for the Poisson equation

The potential distribution in the curved quadrupole is exactly characterized by the Laplace equation, and an approximate solution to the Laplace equation is calculated. We represent the Laplace equation under the coordinates named minimal rotation frame (MRF) and derive an expression on the hexapole and octopole superposition. Our conclusion is in agreement with the results by the numerical (SIMION) method. Based on the Poincare-Lighthill-Kuo (PLK) method reported in our previous work, the nonlinear effects of ion motion are investigated in detail. The frequency shift of ion motion can be well eliminated by coupling the hexapole component with a positive octopole component, and the transmission efficiency of ions is found to decrease dramatically with the increase of the ionic kinetic energy in the z-direction. Furthermore, the transmission characteristics of ions are discussed with regards to the phase-space theory. The results show that the centrifugally introduced axis shift is mainly responsible for the ion losses. A modified direct current (dc) voltage supply pattern is hence proposed to compensate for this effect.

Solutions to most electromagnetic problems use numerical methods, such as the finite element method (FEM), element free method (EFM), and soft computing method. To decrease the computational complexities of these methods, this paper presents an approach for solving electromagnetic problems, called radial basis function (RBF) network-based finite element least square support vector machine (FE-LSSVM). First, the expansion of approximate solutions by the proposed method uses the same structure as the RBF network method. Second, governing equations of electromagnetic problems are transformed to weak integral forms and variational formulations of FEM. Finally, Dirichlet boundary conditions are handled in the LS-SVM framework, which are considered as constraints of an optimization problem. By the Lagrange multiplier method, the quadratic programming problem can be transformed to a problem requiring the solution of a system of equations. The advantages of the proposed method are to directly satisfy the natural boundary conditions of the electromagnetic equations and remarkably improve the calculation accuracy. To verify the efficiency of the method, four categories of electromagnetic problems are investigated by using the proposed method. An analytical method and FEM are also carried out as comparisons to prove the advantages of the method proposed in this paper.

According to Maxwell’s equations, all electromagnetic field problems can be expressed in partial differential equations which are subject to specific boundary conditions. By using Green’s function, the partial differential equations can be transformed into integral equations or differential-integral equations. The analytical solution of these equations can only be obtained in very simple cases. Therefore numerical methods are significant for the solution of practical problems. In numerical solutions the following aspects have to be considered.

This chapter contains sections titled: Poisson's and Laplace's Equations Solutions to Poisson's and Laplace's Equations Green's Functions Uniqueness of the Electrostatic Solution Method of Images

An asymptotic local solution for axi-symmetric heat conduction problems with temperature discontinuity on the boundary