Finite

Dierence Methods
(FDMs) 1
 1st-order Approxima9on
Recall Taylor series expansion:

Forward difference:

Backward difference:

Central difference:
 2nd-order Approxima9on
Forward difference:

Backward difference:

Central difference:
 2D Ellip9c PDEs
The general elliptic problem that is faced in 2D is to solve
(14.1)

where
is the Laplacian
is gradient of u in x direction
is gradient of u in y direction

Equation (14.1) is to be solved on some bounded domain D

in 2-dimensional Euclidean space with boundary that
has conditions
(14.2)
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
The 2D Poisson equation is given by
(14.3)

with boundary conditions

(14.4)

There is no initial condition, because the equation does not

depend on time, hence it becomes boundary value problem.
Suppose that the domain is and equation
(14.3) is to be solved in D subject to Dirichlet boundary
conditions. The domain is covered by a square grid of size
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
Step 1: Generate a grid. For example, a uniform Cartesian
grid can be generated as
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
Generating grids in MATLAB:

% Define domain
a = 0; b = 1;
c = 0; d = 1;

% Define grid sizes

M = 50; % number of points
N = 50; % number of points
hx = (b-a)/M; % length of sub-intervals in x-axis
hy = (d-c)/N; % length of sub-intervals in y-axis

% Generate 2D arrays of grids

[X,Y] = meshgrid(a:hx:b,c:hy:d);
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
We denote by U a grid function whose value at a typical
point in domain D is intended to approximate the
exact solution at that point.
The solution at the boundary nodes (blue dots) is known
from the boundary conditions (BCs) and the solution at the
internal grid points (black dots) are to be approximated.
Step 2: At a typical internal grid point we
approximate the partial derivatives of u by second order
central difference,, which is second order accurate since the
remainder term is
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)

Then the Poisson equation is approximated as

(14.5)

where
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
The local truncation error satisfies

where .

The finite difference discretization is consistent if

We ignore the error term and replace the exact solution

values at the grid points with the approximate
solution values , that is
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)

(14.6)

The finite difference equation at the grid point

involves five grid points in a five-point stencil: ,
, , , and . The center
is called the master grid point, where the finite
difference equation is used to approximate the PDE.
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
Suppose that , then equation (14.6) can be
rearranged into

(14.7)
The difference replacement (14.7) is depicted as in the five-
point stencil:
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
Step 3: Solve the linear system of algebraic equations (14.7)
to get the approximate values for the solution at all grid
points.

Step 4: Error analysis, implementation, visualization, etc.

The linear system of equations (14.7) will transform into a

matrix-vector form:
(14.8)
where, from 2D Poisson equations, the unknowns are a
2D array which we will order into a 1D array.
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
While it is conventional to represent systems of linear
algebraic equations in matrix-vector form, it is not always
necessary to do so. The matrix-vector format is useful for
explanatory purposes and (usually) essential if a direct linear
equation solver is to be used, such as Gaussian elimination
or LU factorization.
For particularly large systems, iterative solution methods are
more efficient and these are usually designed so as not to
require the construction of a coefficient matrix but work
directly with approximation (14.7).
Since and suppose that Hence,
there are 9 equations and 9 unknowns. The first decision to
be taken is how to organize the unknowns into a vector.
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
The equations are ordered in the same way as the unknowns
so that each row of the matrix of coefficients representing
the left of (14.7) will contain at most 5 non-zero entries with
the coefficient 4 appearing on the diagonal.
When (14.7) is applied at points adjacent to the boundary,
one or more of the neighboring values will be known from
the BCs and the corresponding term will be moved to the
right side of the equations. For example, when :

The values of are known from the BCs, hence

they are on the right side of the equations. Then the first row
of the matrix will contain only three non-zero entries.
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
Inner grid points are to be approximated

Arranging into a vector:

2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
Outer grid points are known from the boundary conditions.
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
Working on the first column of the inner grid points gives us

Arranging in matrix-vector form yields

2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
The second column of the inner grid points gives

Arranging in
matrix-vector
form yields:
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
The third column gives

Arranging in matrix-vector form yields

2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
Top BC
Le# BC
Bo/om BC

Right BC
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
For general case, we focus on the equations on the i-th
column of the grid. Since the unknowns in this column are
linked only to unknowns on the two neighboring columns,
these can be expressed as

where B is the tridiagonal matrix,

2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
Methods to generate tridiagonal matrix in MATLAB
% (1) Use for loop
D = zeros(M-1,M-1);
D(1,1) = beta;
D(1,2) = -alpha;
for i=2:M-2
D(i,i) = beta;
D(i,i-1) = -alpha;
D(i,i+1) = -alpha;
end
D(M-1,M-2) = -alpha;
D(M-1,M-1) = beta;

% (2) Use built-in function diag

r2 = beta*ones(M-1,1);
r = -alpha*ones(M-1,1);
A = diag(r2,0) + diag(r(1:M-2),1) + diag(r(1:M-2),-1);
% or
s2 = beta*ones(M-1,1);
s = -alpha*ones(M-2,1);
B = diag(s2,0) + diag(s,1) + diag(s,-1);
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
The vector

arises from the top and bottom boundaries. Also, when i = 1

or M 1, boundary conditions from the vertical edges are
applied, so that
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
The difference equation can now be expressed as a system of
the form

where A is an matrix and the unknowns

and the right hand side vector .
A has the tridiagonal matrix structure:
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
where I is the identity matrix, and the
right hand side vector F:

It is essential to store matrices A, B, and I as sparse

matrices, only the non-zero entries are stored.
2D Poisson Equa9on (Dirichlet Problem)
Generating matrices B and A in MATLAB

% Build matrix B
r2 = 2*ones(M-1,1);
r = -ones(M-2,1);
B = diag(r2,0) + diag(r,1) + diag(r,-1);

% Sparse matrix B
B = sparse(B);

% Build sparse identity matrix

I = speye(M-1);

% Build tridiagonal block matrix A

A = kron(B,I) + kron(I,B);
 Example
Solve the BVP defined by:

on a unit square with boundary conditions:

using second order approximation (central finite difference).

Example
 2D Poisson Equa9on
The right hand side function in MATLAB

function f = poisson_rhs(X,Y)

f = 20*cos(3*pi*X).*sin(2*pi*Y);

Dirichlet BCs in MATLAB

function G = poisson_bcs(X,Y,M)

G(:,1) = Y(:,1).^2; % left

G(:,M+1) = ones(M+1,1); % right
G(1,:) = X(1,:).^3; % bottom
G(M+1,:) = ones(1,M+1); % top
 Neumann Problem
Poisson equation (14.3) is to be solved on the square domain
subject to Neumann boundary condition

where denotes differentiation in the direction of the

outward normal to The normal is not well defined at
corners of the domain and need not be continuous
there.
To generate a finite difference approximation of this problem
we use the same grid as before and Poisson equation (14.3)
is approximated at internal grid points by the five-point
stencil.
 Neumann Problem
At vertical boundaries, where , subtracting the
Taylor expansions

gives us

Rearrange to get

(14.9)
 Neumann Problem
Along the boundary where (note the
negative sign appropriate for the outward normal on this
boundary), when this is applied at the grid point and
we neglect the remainder term, we obtain

or
(14.10)
This approximation involves the value of U at the fictitious
grid point which lies outside the domain D.
We write the approximation (14.7) at the boundary points
(14.11)
 Neumann Problem
We may eliminate between (14.10) and (14.11) to
obtain a difference formula with a four point stencil by
rearranging the formula in (14.10) into
(14.12)
and substitute this into (14.11) to get

or

(14.13)
 Neumann Problem
Along the boundary or at where now the
outward normal is positive or , we obtain

(14.14)
where we have substitution for the fictitious grid point
that lies outside the domain D:
(14.15)
Similar to the left boundary, the approximation (14.7) at the
right boundary becomes

(14.16)
Neumann Problem

= c44ous point
 Neumann Problem
Equation (14.13) also holds with at the corner
where we also have (note the positive sign)
which is approximated by
(14.17)

Combining (14.17) with (14.13) at we find

Hence, for the corner point on the left boundary

(14.18)
 Neumann Problem
For the bottom point at where the outward normal
becomes , the approximation is represented by

to get the fictitious point

(14.19)

Hence at the corner bottom point on the left boundary,

substituting (14.12) and (14.19) into (14.7) we get

(14.20)
 Neumann Problem
In summary, for Neumann BC we need approximation for
for the corner points, which, from

the approximation at point

 Neumann Problem
The points outside the boundary on the left
are approximated using (14.12).
The points outside the boundary on the right
are approximated using (14.15).

The points outside the boundary on the bottom

are approximated using (14.19).

The points outside the boundary on the top

are approximated using (14.17).
 Neumann Problem
Proceeding in this manner for each of the boundary
segments and each corner, we arrive at linear
equations for the values of U in the domain and on
boundaries. We then should assemble the equations into a
matrix form
(14.16)
where we use the same column-wise ordering as before.
 Neumann Problem
where
 Neumann Problem
The right hand side for F actually is approximated in matrix
form

where
 Example
Solve the BVP defined by:

on a unit square with zero-flux on all boundaries:

using second order approximation (central finite difference).

Example