Heterogeneous Multiscale Methods Applied to Stiff Problems with Varying Scales

Abstract

This work explores fast numerical methods for solving rate equations that describe the population densities of chemical species or atomic states. The rate equations are very stiff nonlinear ordinary differential equations, with essentially one slow time scale and a large range of fast scales. We consider implicit multistep and one-step methods. They require the solution of a nonlinear system of equations in each time step with a Newton method. To reduce the cost of this, we use approximations or prefactorization of the Jacobian matrix. Different approximation strategies are explored. The importance of exact discrete conservation is highlighted, leading to an approach where the Jacobian is truncated to banded form and remaining off-diagonal elements are adjusted by a weight that depends on the elements in the full Jacobian. The prefactorization approach uses a QZ decomposition of the leading part of the Jacobian, and a separate treatment of a rank one part. Numerical experiments indicate that these methods give accurate results at a low computational cost.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 15, 2013
Accession Number
ADA582009

Entities

People

  • Olof Runborg

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Air Force
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Decomposition
  • Difference Equations
  • Differential Equations
  • Eigenvalues
  • Electrons
  • Equations
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Free Electrons
  • Ionization
  • Linear Systems
  • Nonlinear Systems
  • Standards

Fields of Study

  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Linear Algebra