Approximation to a parabolic system modeling the thermoelastic contacts of two rods

Abstract

In this article, we study a sequence of finite difference approximate solutions to a parabolic system, which models two dissimilar rods that may come into contact as a result of thermoelastic expansion. We construct the approximate solutions based on a set of finite difference schemes to the system, and we will prove that the approximate solutions converge strongly to the exact solutions. Moreover, we obtain and prove rigorously the error bound, which measures the difference between the exact solutions and approximate solutions in a reasonable norm. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 14:1–25, 1998