Radial basis functions for solving partial differential equations

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• Bengt Fornberg (University of Colorado)
• Thursday 11 June 2009, 15:00-16:00
• MR14, CMS.

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For the task of solving PDEs, finite difference (FD) methods are particularly easy to implement. Finite element (FE) methods are more flexible geometrically, but tend to be difficult to make very accurate. Pseudospectral (PS) methods can be seen as a limit of FD methods if one keeps on increasing their order of accuracy. They are extremely effective in many situations, but this strength comes at the price of very severe geometric restrictions. A more standard introduction to PS methods (rather than via FD methods of increasing orders of accuracy) is in terms of expansions in orthogonal functions (such as Fourier, Chebyshev, etc.).

Radial basis functions (RBFs) were first proposed around 1970 as a tool for interpolating scattered data. Since then, both our knowledge about them and their range of applications have grown tremendously. In the context of solving PDEs, we can see the RBF approach as a major generalization of PS methods, abandoning the orthogonality of the basis functions and in return obtaining much improved simplicity and flexibility. Spectral accuracy becomes now easily available also when using completely unstructured meshes, permitting local node refinements in critical areas. A very counterintuitive parameter range (making all the RBFs very flat) turns out to be of special interest.

As was shown recently by Dr Natasha Flyer and collaborators, RBF discretization competes very favorably against all previous approaches for solving many convection-dominated PDEs on a sphere or in spherical shells – geometries that are ubiquitous in weather, climate, and geophysical modeling.

This talk is part of the Applied and Computational Analysis series.

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