5/30/ Runge 4 th Order Method Chemical Engineering Majors Authors: Autar Kaw, Charlie Barker Transforming Numerical Methods Education for STEM Undergraduates

Runge-Kutta 4 th Order Method

3 Runge-Kutta 4 th Order Method where For Runge Kutta 4 th order method is given by

How to write Ordinary Differential Equation Example is rewritten as In this case How does one write a first order differential equation in the form of

Example The concentration of salt, in a home made soap maker is given as a function of time by At the initial time, t = 0, the salt concentration in the tank is 50g/L. Using Euler’s method and a step size of h=1.5 min, what is the salt concentration after 3 minutes.

Solution Step 1:

Solution Cont is the approximate concentration of salt at

Solution Cont Step 2:

Solution Cont is the approximate concentration of salt at

Solution Cont The exact solution of the ordinary differential equation is given by The solution to this nonlinear equation at t=3 minutes is

Comparison with exact results Figure 1. Comparison of Runge-Kutta 4th order method with exact solution

Step size, −14109 −11444 − − − Effect of step size (exact) Table 1 Value of concentration of salt at 3 minutes for different step sizes

Effects of step size on Runge- Kutta 4 th Order Method Figure 2. Effect of step size in Runge-Kutta 4th order method

Comparison of Euler and Runge- Kutta Methods Figure 3. Comparison of Runge-Kutta methods of 1st, 2nd, and 4th order.

Additional Resources For all resources on this topic such as digital audiovisual lectures, primers, textbook chapters, multiple-choice tests, worksheets in MATLAB, MATHEMATICA, MathCad and MAPLE, blogs, related physical problems, please visit a_4th_method.html

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