Monday, March 28th, 2005
2:30pm - 3:30pm, in Science 2-065

Karen Ricciardi

UMass Boston

Determination of optimal upstream collocation points applied to the convection-diffusion equation

Abstract: The analytic formulas for the Hermite collocation solution of the steady-state convection-diffusion equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions defined on a uniform mesh in one spatial dimension are known. These approximation formulas are functions of the collocation discretization and can be optimized for accuracy through the use of upstream weighting of the convective term. Determining the optimal collocation discretization, however, is not trivial. This work explores the nature of such an optimization problem and the use of a genetic algorithm to determine the optimal collocation discretization.