A numerical solver for high dimensional transient Fokker–Planck equation in modeling polymeric fluids

In this paper, a tensor decomposition approach combined with Chebyshev spectral differentiation is presented to solve the high dimensional transient Fokker–Planck equations (FPE) arising in the simulation of polymeric fluids via multi-bead-spring (MBS) model. Generalizing the authors' previous work on the stationary FPE, the transient solution is obtained in a single CANDECOMP/PARAFAC decomposition (CPD) form for all times via the alternating least squares algorithm. This is accomplished by treating the temporal dimension in the same manner as all other spatial dimensions, thereby decoupling it from them. As a result, the transient solution is obtained without resorting to expensive time stepping schemes. A new, relaxed approach for imposing the vanishing boundary conditions is proposed, improving the quality of the approximation. The asymptotic behavior of the temporal basis functions is studied. The proposed solver scales very well with the dimensionality of the MBS model. Numerical results for systems up to 14 dimensional state space are successfully obtained on a regular personal computer and compared with the corresponding matrix Riccati differential equation (for linear models) or Monte Carlo simulations (for nonlinear models).