A Fast Finite Difference Method for Biharmonic Equations on Irregular Domains

Abstract

Biharmonic equations have many applications, especially in fluid and solid mechanics, but difficult to solve due to the fourth order derivatives in the differential equation. In this paper a fast second order accurate algorithm based on a finite difference discretization and a Cartesian grid is developed for two dimensional biharmonic equations on irregular domains with essential boundary conditions. The irregular domain is embedded into a rectangular region and the biharmonic equation is decoupled to two Poisson equations. An auxiliary unknown quantity deltau along the boundary is introduced so that fast Poisson solvers on irregular domains can be used. Non-trivial numerical example show the efficiency of the proposed method. The number of iterations of the method is independent of the mesh size. Another key to the method is a new interpolation scheme to evaluate the residual of the Schur complement system. The new biharmonic solver has been applied to solve the incompressible Stokes flow on an irregular domain.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA444064

Entities

People

  • Guo Chen
  • Ping Lin
  • Zhilin Li

Organizations

  • North Carolina State University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Computations
  • Difference Equations
  • Differential Equations
  • Equations
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • Geometry
  • Integral Equations
  • Linear Regression Analysis
  • Mathematics
  • Mechanics
  • Poisson Equation
  • Regression Analysis
  • Stratified Fluids
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Fluid Dynamics.
  • Linear Algebra
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.