Numerical investigations of the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation

Thesis (M.Sc.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2008. Computational Science Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-57) This thesis will develop material regarding the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation, a nonlinear partial differential equation which has soliton solutions. We introduce th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Johansen, Brian R.
Other Authors: Memorial University of Newfoundland. Dept. of Computational Science;
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: 2008
Subjects:
Online Access:http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/theses4/id/78003
Description
Summary:Thesis (M.Sc.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2008. Computational Science Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-57) This thesis will develop material regarding the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation, a nonlinear partial differential equation which has soliton solutions. We introduce the equation with its history and establish some preliminaries in §1. In §2, we will examine the soliton solutions and the uniqueness of such. We will also speak of the construction of multiple soliton solutions, as well as other solutions. Next, the conservation properties of the KdV equation will be visited, then the properties of interacting solitons. In §3 we will discuss the historical numerical schemes for the KdV equation, including finite difference methods, pseudospectral methods, collocation, and finite element methods. We will comment on their accuracy and efficiency. Contained within §4 is a selection of numerical schemes which were implemented (and in one case, improved!) by the author.