RE: Octave PDE initial value problem solvers

[Neil.Francis]

Hello,

Thanks Geordie, Robert and Carlo for your replies -

I will follow up your suggestions.

It perhaps isn't quite so impressive an undertaking!  There is a lot of
relevant published work, so I don't expect to be doing any trailblazing.
The environmental physics journals seem to be most useful - the problem
is similar to that of modelling soil salinity and pollutant transport.
There is also at least one freely downloadable (but without source code)
software package available that can do most of what I want - Hydrus 1D
from the Environmental Sciences department at the University of
California.  I only require a 'first approximation' 1D model (though
ultimately it might be of interest to develop it as 2D or 3D).
Simplifications I can make (at least initially) include

* Isothermal - heat flow doesn't need to be modelled.  Evaporation is
driven by a specified evaporation demand (in m/s for a 1D model)

* That the solute distribution will not influence this evaporation rate.

* Behaviour such as the mud cracking as it dries does not need to be
modelled.

The one behaviour that needs to be incorporated, which I have not yet
noticed in the models that I've come across, is the change of volume
while the moisture and solute distributions are changing.  But I'm sure
somebody somewhere has been thinking about how best to handle this.
Though the equations aren't the same, I suspect that folk that model
heat distribution in mechanical components, where their expansion and
contraction must be accounted for, have approaches that might have some
applicability to what I'm doing.

Neil



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