APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTATION, cilt.163, sa.1, ss.147-162, 2005 (SCI-Expanded)
In this paper, subdomain collocation (SC) and Petrov-Galerkin (PG) methods based on spline finite elements have been applied to the one-dimensional positive temperature coefficient (PTC) thermistor problem with a temperature dependent ramp function electrical conductivity to obtain the predicted temperature distributions and the locations of the free boundaries in the steady-state case. The numerical results obtained by the present methods have been compared with the exact solution and also those obtained by earlier authors. A Fourier stability analysis of each method is investigated. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.