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The study of biofilm formation is becoming increasingly important. Microbes that produce biofilms have complicated impact on medical implants. In this paper, we construct an unconditionally positive non-standard finite difference scheme for a mathematical model of biofilm formation on a medical implant. The unknowns in many applications reflect values that cannot be negative, such as chemical component concentrations or population numbers. The model employed here uses the bistable Allen-Cahn partial differential equation, which is a generalization of Fisher’s equation. We study consistency and convergence of the scheme constructed. We compare the performance of our scheme with a classical finite difference scheme using four numerical experiments. The technique used in the construction of unconditionally positive method in this study can be applied to other areas of mathematical biology and sciences. The results here elaborate the benefits of the non-standard approximations over the classical approximations in practical applications.

In this work, we consider numerical solutions of the FitzHugh–Nagumo system of equations describing the propagation of electrical signals in nerve axons. The system consists of two coupled equations: a nonlinear partial differential equation and a linear ordinary differential equation. We begin with a review of the qualitative properties of the nonlinear space independent system of equations. The subequation approach is applied to derive dynamically consistent schemes for the submodels. This is followed by a consistent and systematic merging of the subschemes to give three explicit nonstandard finite difference schemes in the limit of fast extinction and slow recovery. A qualitative study of the schemes together with the error analysis is presented. Numerical simulations are given to support the theoretical results and verify the efficiency of the proposed schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two new explicit finite difference schemes for the solution of the one-dimensional Korteweg-de-Vries equation are proposed. This equation describes the character of a wave generated by an incompressible fluid. We analyse the spectral properties of our schemes against two existing schemes proposed by Zabusky and Kruskal (1965) and Wang et al. (2008). An optimisation technique based on minimisation of the dispersion error is implemented to compute the optimal value of the spatial step size at a given value of the temporal step size and this is validated by some numerical experiments. The performance of the four methods are compared in regard to dispersive and dissipative errors and their ability to conserve mass, momentum and energy by using two numerical experiments which involve solitons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use three existing schemes namely, upwind forward Euler, non-standard finite difference (NSFD) and unconditionally positive finite difference (UPFD) schemes to solve two numerical experiments described by a linear and a nonlinear advection-diffusion-reaction equation with constant coefficients. These equations model exponential travelling waves and biofilm growth on a medical implant respectively. We study the exact and numerical dissipative and dispersive properties of the three schemes for both problems. Moreover, L1 error, dispersion and dissipation errors, at some values of temporal and spatial step sizes have been computed for the three schemes for both problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]