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Difference Between FEM FDM and FVM
Difference Between FEM FDM and FVM
Difference Between FEM FDM and FVM
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r certain time-dependent simulations, one needs to use so-called explicit solvers for reasons of efficiency.
Implementing such solver techniques is more difficult for the finite-element method than for the finitedifference and finite-volume methods. However, this has successfully been commercialized in some cases, such
as in crash simulations.
Finite-Difference Method: Advantages and Disadvantages
The finite-difference method is defined dimension per dimension; this makes it easy to increase the element
order to get higher-order accuracy. If you can fit the simulation in a rectangular or box-shaped geometry using
a regular grid, efficient implementations are much easier than for finite-element and finite-volume methods.
Regular grids are useful for very-large-scale simulations on supercomputers often used in, as mentioned before,
meteorological, seismological, and astrophysical simulations.
With the finite-difference method, you may easily run into problems handling curved boundaries for the
purpose of defining the boundary conditions. Boundary conditions are needed to truncate the computational
domain. They represent communication with the surrounding world, which is the part that you do not want
included in your simulation. If one can overcome the boundary-condition problem on curved boundaries, the
method gives very efficient and high quality results.
For computations that need high accuracy, the extra effort in making boundary-fitted meshes and the associated
complications of such meshes for the implementation may be worth it. Examples include Formula 1 car
computational-fluid-dynamic (CFD) simulations and space-shuttle CFD simulations. The finite-difference
method is more difficult to use for handling material discontinuities. In addition, it does not lend itself for local
grid refinement or anything similar to adaptive mesh refinement. This may be needed to resolve local rapid
variations in solutions such as around a corner of a complex shape, as described earlier.
Finite-Volume Method: Advantages and Disadvantages
The finite-volume method is a natural choice for CFD problems, since the partial differential equations you have
to solve for CFD are conservation laws. However, both finite differences and finite elements can also be used for
CFD. Efficient technology for CFD with the finite-element method has become increasingly popular over the last
10 to 15 years. Techniques for CFD with the finite-difference and finite-volume method have been known and
used much longer.
The finite-volume methods strength is that it only needs to do flux evaluation for the cell boundaries. This also
holds for nonlinear problems, which makes it extra powerful for robust handling of (nonlinear) conservation
laws appearing in transport problems.
The local accuracy of the finite-volume method, such as close to a corner of interest, can be increased by refining
the mesh around that corner, similar to the finite-element method. However, the functions that approximate
the solution when using the finite-volume method cannot be easily made of higher order. This is a disadvantage
of the finite-volume method compared to the finite-element and finite-difference methods.
What are the major examples of each?
Finite-element method: All kinds of structural analysis, heat transfer, chemical engineering, electromagnetics
(including electrostatics, magnetostatics, low-frequency electromagnetics, and frequency-domain
high-frequency electromagnetic waves), multi-physics, and CFD.
Finite-difference method: Weather calculations, astrophysics, seismology, physical realism in computer
graphics, and special effects.
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