Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

published_or_final_version / Physics / Master / Master of Philosophy

Thesis (M.S.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves: [73]-74)

The physicists and mathematicians have put a lot of efforts in the numerical analysis of various types of partial differential equations on unbounded domain. The time- dependent partial differential equations(PDEs) also have a wide range of applications in physics, geography and many other interdisciplines. This thesis is concerned with the numerical solutions of such kind of partial differential equations on unbounded spatial domain, especially the Korteweg-de Vries(KdV) equations. Since it is unable to solve the problem directly due to its unboundedness, the common way to surpass such difficulty is to introduce proper conditions on the truncated artificial boundaries and to approximate the problem on a bounded domain, which is also known as the Absorbing Boundary Conditions(ABCs). One of the main contributions of this thesis is to design accurate local absorbing boundary conditions for linearized KdV equations and to extend the method to non- linear KdV equations on unbounded domain. Pad´e approximation is the main tool to approximate the cubic root in the construction of local absorbing boundary conditions(LABCs) for a linearized KdV equation on unbounded domain. Besides, we also introduce the continued fraction method in the approximation of cubic root. To avoid the high-order derivatives in the absorbing boundary conditions, a sequence of auxiliary variables are applied accordingly. Then the original problem on unbounded domain is reduced to an approximated initial boundary value(IBV) problem defined on a finite domain. Based on previous work, we are able to extend the method to the design of efficient local absorbing boundary conditions for nonlinear KdV equations on unbounded domain. The unifying approach method is applied to this nonlinear case. The idea of the unifying approach method is to separate inward- and outward-going waves and to build suitable approximated linear operator with a “one-way operator”. Then we unite the approximated linear operator with the nonlinear subproblem and propose boundary conditions for the nonlinear subproblem along the artificial boundaries. The numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our local absorbing boundary conditions. Keywords: Korteweg-de Vries equation; Local absorbing boundary conditions; Pad´e approximation; Continued fraction method; Unifying approach.

We study the Korteweg-de Vries-Burgers equation. With a deep investigation into the spectral and smoothing properties of the linearized system, it is shown by applying Banach Contraction Principle and Gronwall's Inequality to the integral equation based on the variation of parameters formula and explicit representation of the operator semigroup associated with the linearized equation that, under appropriate assumption appropriate assumption on initial states w(x, 0), the nonlinear system is well-posed and its solutions decay exponentially to the mean value of the initial state in H1(O, 1) as t -> +". / Ph. D.

This thesis is concerned with the existence and spectral stability of periodic waves in the fractional Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation and the fractional modified Korteweg-de Vries (mKdV) equation. We study the existence of periodic travelling waves using various tools such as Green's function for fractional Laplacian operator, Petviashvili fixed point method, and a new variational characterization in which the periodic waves in fractional KdV and fractional mKdV are realized as the constrained minimizers of the quadratic part of the energy functional subject to fixed L3 and L4 norm respectively. This new variational framework allows us to identify the existence region of periodic travelling waves and to derive the criterion for spectral stability of the periodic waves with respect to perturbations of the same period. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

published_or_final_version / abstract / Mechanical Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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Thesis (MSc (Applied Mathematics))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / The Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) hierarchy is an important class of nonlinear evolution equa- tions with various applications in the physical sciences and in engineering. In this thesis analytical solution methods were used to ¯nd exact solutions of the third and ¯fth order KdV equations, and numerical methods were used to compute numerical solutions of these equations. Analytical methods used include the Fan sub-equation method for constructing exact trav- eling wave solutions, and the simpli¯ed Hirota method for constructing exact N-soliton solutions. Some well known cases were considered. The Fourier spectral method and the ¯nite di®erence method with Runge-Kutta time dis- cretisation were employed to solve the third and the ¯fth order KdV equations with periodic boundary conditions. The one soliton and the two soliton solutions were used as initial conditions. The numerical solutions are obtained and compared with the exact solutions. The propagation of a single soliton as well as the interaction of double soliton solutions is modeled well by both numerical methods, although the Fourier spectral method performs better. The stability, consistency and convergence of these numerical methods were investigated. Error propagation is studied. The theoretically predicted quadratic convergence of the ¯nite di®erence method as well as the exponential convergence of the Fourier spectral method is con¯rmed in numerical experiments.