Convection-diffusion Problems

Book excerpt: Many physical problems involve diffusive and convective (transport) processes. When diffusion dominates convection, standard numerical methods work satisfactorily. But when convection dominates diffusion, the standard methods become unstable, and special techniques are needed to compute accurate numerical approximations of the unknown solution. This convection-dominated regime is the focus of the book. After discussing at length the nature of solutions to convection-dominated convection-diffusion problems, the authors motivate and design numerical methods that are particularly suited to this c.