Differential quadrature solution of heat- and mass-transfer equations

The heat- and mass-transfer equations have an important role in various thermal and diffusion processes. These equations are nonlinear, due to the solution dependent diffusion coefficient and the source term. In this study, one- and two-dimensional nonlinear heat- and mass-transfer equations are solved numerically. To this end, the differential quadrature method is used to discretize the problem spatially and the resulting nonlinear system of ordinary differential equations in time are solved using the Runge–Kutta method. The solution is improved in time iteratively by solving considerably small sized linear system of resulting equations. To demonstrate its usefulness and accuracy, the proposed method is applied to four test problems, involving different nonlinearities.