Improving the accuracy of DRBEM for convective partial differential equations

Abstract The dual reciprocity boundary element method (DRBEM) has been successfully applied to the solution of many examples of linear partial differential equations (PDEs). Our experience with the method shows that it encounters some convergence problems when dealing with convective equations. The main problem lies in the differentiation of a radial basis function in a bounded domain. Here following Zhu and Zhang [Zhu SP, Zhang YL. Improvement on dual reciprocity boundary element method for equations with convective terms. Comm Appl Numer Meth 1994;10:361–371], we have proposed and analysed a transformation technique for removing convective terms. We have shown that our transformation improves and leads to better convergence results with DRBEM than solving the original PDEs directly. Five numerical examples are illustrated.