The PDE2D Collocation Finite Element Method

Date

March 28th, 2008

Speaker

Granville Sewell

Abstract

PDE2D (www.pde2d.com, sold through Visual Numerics' e-commerce site) is a finite element program which solves very general PDE systems in 1D intervals, arbitrary 2D regions and a wide range of simple 3D regions. Both Galerkin and collocation options are available for 1D and 2D problems, only collocation for 3D problems. The collocation algorithms have some novel features, particularly relating to how non-rectangular regions are handled. Some advantages and disadvantages of these collocation algorithms are discussed, relative to the more standard Galerkin methods.

A new GUI now allows extremely easy access to the PDE2D collocation methods, in fact, the new GUI is virtually impossible to beat in terms of ease-of-use because it requires the user to supply the absolute minimum of information necessary to describe the PDEs and boundary conditions.