A MIXED GREEN ELEMENT FORMULATION FOR THE TRANSIENT BURGERS EQUATION

Abstract

The transient one-dimensional Burgers equation is solved by a mixed formulation of the Green element method (GEM) which is based essentially on the singular integral theory of the boundary element method (BEM). The GEM employs the fundamental solution of the term with the highest derivative to construct a system of discrete first-order non- linear equations in terms of the primary variable, the velocity, and its spatial derivative which are solved by a two-level generalized and a modified time discretization scheme and by the Newton–Raphson algorithm. We found that the two-level scheme with a weight of 0ċ67 and the modified fully implicit scheme with a weight of 1ċ5 offered some marginal gains in accuracy. Three numerical examples which cover a wide range of flow regimes are used to demonstrate the capabilities of the present formulation. Improvement of the present formulation over an earlier BE formulation which uses a linearized operator of the differential equation is demonstrated. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.