Consistency and Convergence Properties of 20 Recent and Old Numerical Schemes for the Diffusion Equation

Abstract

We collected 20 explicit and stable numerical algorithms for the one-dimensional transient diffusion equation and analytically examined their consistency and convergence properties. Most of the methods used have been constructed recently and their truncation errors are given in this paper for the first time. The truncation errors contain the ratio of the time and space steps; thus, the algorithms are conditionally consistent. We performed six numerical tests to compare their performance and try to explain the observed accuracies based on the truncation errors. In one of the experiments, the diffusion coefficient is supposed to change strongly in time, where a nontrivial analytical solution containing the Kummer function was successfully reproduced.