Robert M. M. Mattheij

This volume presents a review of advanced technological problems in the glass industry and of the mathematics involved. It is amazing that such a seemingly small research area is extremely rich and calls for an impressively large variety of mathematical methods, including numerical simulations of considerable complexity. The problems treated here are very typical of the field of glass manufacturing and cover a large spectrum of complementary subjects: injection molding by various techniques, radiative heat transfer in glass, nonisothermal flows and fibre spinning. The book can certainly be useful not only to applied mathematicians, but also to physicists and engineers, who can find in it an overview of the most advanced models and methods.

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are used to describe a large variety of physical phenomena, from fluid flow to electromagnetic fields, and are indispensable to such disparate fields as aircraft simulation and computer graphics. While most existing texts on PDEs deal with either analytical or numerical aspects of PDEs, this innovative and comprehensive textbook features a unique approach that integrates analysis and numerical solution methods and includes a third component - modeling - to address real-life problems. The authors believe that modeling can be learned only by doing; hence a separate chapter containing 16 user-friendly case studies of elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic equations is included and numerous exercises are included in all other chapters. Partial Differential Equations enables readers to deepen their understanding of a topic ubiquitous in mathematics and science and to tackle practical problems. The advent of fast computers and the development of numerical methods have enabled the modern engineer to use a large variety of packages to find numerical approximations to solutions of PDEs. Problems are usually standard and a thorough knowledge of a well-chosen subset of analytical and numerical tools and methodologies is necessary when dealing with real-life problems. When one is dealing with PDEs in practice, it becomes clear that both numerical and analytical treatments of the problem are needed.

In order to emphasize the relationships and cohesion between analytical and numerical techniques, this book presents a comprehensive and integrated treatment of both aspects in combination with the modeling of relevant problem classes. This text is uniquely geared to provide enough insight into qualitative aspects of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to offer a thorough account of quantitative methods for approximating solutions numerically and to acquaint the reader with mathematical modeling, where such ODEs often play a significant role. Originally published in 1995, the text remains timely and useful to a wide audience. It provides a thorough introduction to ODEs, since it treats not only standard aspects such as existence, uniqueness, stability, one-step methods, multistep methods, and singular perturbations, but also chaotic systems, differential-algebraic systems, and boundary value problems. The authors aim to show the use of ODEs in real life problems, so there is an extended chapter in which not only the general concepts of mathematical modeling but also illustrative examples from various fields are presented. A chapter on classical mechanics makes the book self-contained.

This book is the most comprehensive, up-to-date account of the popular numerical methods for solving boundary value problems in ordinary differential equations. It aims at a thorough understanding of the field by giving an in-depth analysis of the numerical methods by using decoupling principles. Numerous exercises and real-world examples are used throughout to demonstrate the methods and the theory. Although first published in 1988, this republication remains the most comprehensive theoretical coverage of the subject matter, not available elsewhere in one volume. Many problems, arising in a wide variety of application areas, give rise to mathematical models which form boundary value problems for ordinary differential equations. These problems rarely have a closed form solution, and computer simulation is typically used to obtain their approximate solution. This book discusses methods to carry out such computer simulations in a robust, efficient, and reliable manner.