The Method of Fundamental Solutions with Eigenfunction Expansion Method for Nonhomogeneous Diffusion Equation

In this article we describe a numerical method to solve a nonhomogeneous diffusion equation with arbitrary geometry by combining the method of fundamental solutions (MFS), the method of particular solutions (MPS), and the eigenfunction expansion method (EEM). This forms a meshless numerical scheme of the MFS-MPS-EEM model to solve nonhomogeneous diffusion equations with time-independent source terms and boundary conditions for any time and any shape. Nonhomogeneous diffusion equation with complex domain can be separated into a Poisson equation and a homogeneous diffusion equation using thismodel. The Poisson equation is solved by theMFS-MPSmodel, in which the compactly supported radial basis functions are adopted for the MPS. On the other hand, utilizing the EEM the diffusion equation is first translated to a Helmholtz equation, which is then solved by the MFS together with the technique of the singular value decomposition (SVD). Since the present meshless method does not need mesh generation, nodal connectivity, or numerical integration, the computational effort and memory storage required are minimal as comparedwith other numerical schemes. Test results for two 2Ddiffusion problems showgood comparability with the analytical solutions. The proposed algorithm is then extended to solve a problem with irregular domain and the results compare very well with solutions of a finite element scheme. Therefore, the present scheme has been proved to be very promising as a meshfree numerical method to solve nonhomogeneous diffusion equations with time-independent source terms of any time frame, and for any arbitrary geometry. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 22: 1173–1196, 2006