Numerical solution to a two-dimensional nonlinear heat equation using radial basis functions

The paper presents a numerical solution to the heat wave motion problem for a degenerate second-order nonlinear parabolic equation with a source term. The nonlinearity is conditioned by the power dependence of the heat conduction coefficient on temperature. The problem for the case of two spatial variables is considered with the boundary condition specifying the heat wave motion law. A new solution algorithm based on an expansion in radial basis functions and the boundary element method is proposed. The solution is constructed stepwise in time with finite difference time approximation. At each time step, a boundary value problem for the Poisson equation corresponding to the original equation at a fixed time is solved. The solution to this problem is constructed iteratively as the sum of a particular solution to the nonhomogeneous equation and a solution to the corresponding homogeneous equation satisfying the boundary conditions. The homogeneous equation is solved by the boundary element method. The particular solution is sought by the collocation method using inhomogeneity expansion in radial basis functions. The calculation algorithm is optimized by parallelizing the computations.The algorithm is implemented as a program written in the C++ language. The parallel computations are organized by using the OpenCL standard, and this allows one to run the same parallel code either on multi-core CPUs or on graphic CPUs. Test cases are solved to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution method and the correctness of the developed computational technique. The calculation results are compared with known exact solutions, as well as with the results we obtained earlier. The accuracy of the solutions and the calculation time are estimated. The effectiveness of using various systems of radial basis functions to solve the problems under study is analyzed. The most suitable system of functions is selected. The implemented complex computational experiment shows higher calculation accuracy of the proposed new algorithm than that of the previously developed one.