A numerical investigation of blow-up in reaction-diffusion problems with traveling heat sources

This paper studies the numerical solution of a reaction-diffusion differential equation with traveling heat sources. According to the fact that the locations of heat sources are known, we add auxiliary mesh points exactly at heat sources and present a novel moving mesh algorithm for solving the problem. Several examples are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the new moving mesh method, especially in the case of two or three traveling heat sources. Moreover, numerical results illustrate that the speed of the movement of the heat source is critical for blow-up when there is only one traveling heat source. For the case of two traveling heat sources, blow-up depends not only on the speed but also on the distance between the two traveling heat sources. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.