A comparative study of numerical approximations for solving the Smoluchowski coagulation equation

Abstract

In this work, numerical approximations for solving the one dimensional Smoluchowski coagulation equation on non-uniform meshes has been analyzed. Among the various available numerical methods, finite volume and sectional methods have explicit advantage such as mass conservation and an accurate prediction of different order moments. Here, a recently developed efficient finite volume scheme (Singh et al., 2015) and the cell average technique (Kumar et al., 2006) are compared. The numerical comparison is established for both analytically tractable as well as physically relevant kernels. It is concluded that the finite volume scheme predicts both number density as well as different order moments with higher accuracy than the cell average technique. Moreover, the finite volume scheme is computationally less expensive than the cell average technique.