A Comparative Study on Fourth Order and Butcher’s Fifth Order Runge-Kutta Methods with Third Order Initial Value Problem (IVP)

Abstract

In this paper, Butcher's fifth order Runge-Kutta (RK5) and fourth order Runge-Kutta (RK4) methods have been employed to solve the Initial Value Problems (IVP) involving third order Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). These two proposed methods are quite proficient and practically well suited for solving engineering problems based on such problems. To obtain the accuracy of the numerical outcome for this study, we have compared the approximate results with the exact results and found a good agreement between the exact and approximate solutions. In addition, to achieve more accuracy in the solution, the step size needs to be very small. Moreover, the error terms have been analyzed for these two methods and also compared by an appropriate example.