Authors: Peter K Moore
Publish Date: 2007/11/09
Volume: 46, Issue: 2, Pages: 121-139
Abstract
The performance of automatic codes for solving reaction–diffusion systems is controlled by a variety of parameters Some of them are invisible to the user while others can be modified For the latter default values are available The effects of four such parameters are studied for a code that couples the methodoflines in time with a highorder hrefinement finite element strategy in space The key parameters considered are the ratio of the temporal error tolerance to the spatial error tolerance two parameters governing convergence of the iterative methods for the linear and nonlinear systems and the number of time steps between regridding These parameters are typical in methodoflines based codes Computations on a model problem demonstrate that both small and large temporal to spatial error ratios lead to performance degradation as does less frequent regridding They also show that insufficient convergence in the nonlinear solver can reduce the reliability of the spatial error estimates
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